The second part is good :) I cant beat poly's advice but one thing that helped me a lot is start from the extremes and work down, for example with the amount knob put it on 100% then play with the other knobs. When you get something you like put the amount to -100%. Do this with all of them one at a time, it gives you a good idea of what they do. :)
yeah, just take it one step at a time. Play with the pulvs and heisen, best thing to do is take a day and just start messing with everything, tweak this, move that and see how the sound changes...