I'm tyring to reverse-engineer how this cover was done:

Around that time stamp we can see the player switch from clean (not totally clean) to hi-gain by toggling the pick=up selector. However, his picking/strumming continued in the same pick-up region.

I tried tinkering around with my set-up, which is simply:

* Entry-level electric guitar (has pick-up selector and dials but no whammy)
* Amp (Yamaha THR10II)

The result was, no matter how I switched my pickup selector or strummed on all the different pickup regions, I couldn't get a different sound. It was either full hi-gain or nothing. I'm a bit surprised because the procedure seems simple enough in theory. Not sure if there are hardware additions I will need (yet expression pedal seems over kill).

At first glance, I seem to have everything the guy in the video has but I can't seem to pull of a switch from normal to hi gain mid-song. So it's getting difficult for me to troubleshoot what I'm doing wrong and whether or not it's even possible (maybe he had something else off-camera).

Question
--------

How can I switch to cleanish electric tone to hi-gain electric tone via the pickup selector?