FX Advice for Ugly Voice

Ok, so I've been writing and recording for 30 years or so and my voice has always held me back.  I have ability and range, lots of passion and drama, but I have an ugly voice.  I would have no problem with a vocalist recording on my songs, or as collaborations, but I don't think anyone is interested in re-recording vocal work on about 12 albums worth of music accumulated over the years. "here you go, please re-sing these 130 songs and let me know when you're done, thanks."  
 
That ain't gonna work....
 
So...how about using some effects to color and remove the ugly from my vocal tracks?  Maybe something that becomes signature, for me and my style.  I've experimented a little with Amp Sims and phase effects, but they sound a bit too familiar and cliched and almost sounds like I'm trying to emulate Deftones (although I do think their vocalist uses a certain effect as signature to color his voice too)
 
I'm just not very inventive about FX.  My musical style does lend itself to creative effects but I'm just not real creative with them. Does anyone have any ideas on what might work for hiding the ugly tone in a person's voice?  
 
I included a song here as an example of what I sound like.  Maybe some heavy EQ'ing...?  
 
http://www.vodalavoid.com/music/boundandloved.mp3
 
 

I agree with Guitarhacker, there is nothing wrong with the character or timbre of your voice, it just needs a little pitch correction. Have you ever thought about taking lessons to work on your pitch? Or just finding some pitch exercises online? Otherwise I would agree with the advice to apply some Melodyne to your vocals. I think your timing is fine, you don't want to get that too mechanical anyway. 
 
It's very common to hate the sound of your own voice. I've been told many times that I have a good singing voice - they always had me sing the lead in school musicals, and when I was in a Barbershop quartet they insisted I sang lead, yet whenever I hear a recording of my voice I just want to curl up and die because of how awful it sounds. It's a natural human reaction to feel weirded out when you hear your own voice from the listeners position, because you're so used to hearing it from inside your own head. 
 
When you said you had an ugly voice, I was expecting to hear something along the lines of Donald Fagan, something which sounds quirky at first but which grows on you (like whiskey). But really, there's nothing ugly about it at all. Correct those pitch inconsistencies and you'll be flying. Although I'm absolutely 100% sure that people have told you that there's nothing ugly about your voice before! I'm guessing that you just thought they were being nice....

Hey thanks ya'll.  Sounds like I need to make friends with Melodyne Editor.  I will take your advice.
 
Maybe fixing my pitch issues is the key here.  It's funny, I can always here pitch problems with others, but I don't hear my own, apparently.  
 
I'll try this and if this doesn't work and I still sound repulsive, I will likely be back bellyaching about it looking for an FX solution.
 
Seriously, thanks for taking the time.  
 
 
 

I dug the tune and agree that you don't need much tweaking on that cut....it fits the bill in my rocking preferences.  

Bitflipper - I think highly of your opinion, so I'm going to try some of your suggestions.  I've never done any of that level of FX and engineering - I generally try to capture good performances and put minimal FX on things.  So it will be an interesting trip here to dive in to this. 
 
BASSJOKER - much appreciated.  To be honest, I don't mind my raspy scream-o vocal stuff, and it's right in my sweet spot - but I really don't like my smooth vocal one bit.  I have to close-mic and add heavy compression to find a smooth vocal tone I can stand.  And that wouldn't work on this song at all, nor most of my other material. 
 
Codamedia - I hear you my friend, but the funny thing is I've never really embraced the idea of being a vocalist one bit.  I never wanted to do it.  I'm a musician, not a singer.  I like recording instruments and writing the melodies and putting that all together - but the vocal stuff is a bottle neck for production for me.  I've got probably 20 songs just waiting for me to do vocals.  Everything else is done.  Some of these songs have been done for years.  I wish I could just be an instrumentalist, but vocals just dominate songwriting in my mind and thoughts. 
 
I would absolutely prefer a clean performance with good pitch and transitional notes, something more honest.  But it doesn't hurt my feelings to cheat on vocals since I don't consider myself a vocalist in the first place - see how I just rationalized that?  Ha ha. 

Voda La Void
Ok, so Melodyne is out of my budget and is a non-starter for me at this time.  Maybe in a couple of months...  Really would like to know how it would improve my pitchy problems, but I'm just going to have to wait.

I strongly recommend the old school approach....
Re-record it until you you get it right!
 
It worked for 70+ years.... then autotune and melodyne came around giving everyone the impression they could "fix it in the mix"! It's always better to get it right to begin with.

Have you tried using the speedcomping feature in Sonar? I'm not much of a singer myself, but I've found that if I sing six or eight takes all the way through, consecutively, I learn how to sing the song as I'm going, using ideas that happen in take three, for example, to make take four better, and so on. Doing it this way -- and not taking vocal lessons -- I find I can usually piece together a pretty good composite track which requires very little or no Melodyne enhancement. Sometimes I still have to punch in a phrase or two, but not always. I think that knowing I am going to sing a bunch of takes all the way through and back-to-back sort of takes the pressure off and lets me be more natural, because in this scenario mistakes are OK -- I'm sure there will always be at least one acceptable take of every phrase, so I'm free to play around, which can lead to a better performance. You seem to have the raw material. If you haven't tried this technique, I suggest you give it a shot.

Not because I really need to, but because I'm a noob, I depend on Izotope Nectar 2 for vocal tracks. The preset gets me in the ball park, and i tweak and turn on/off the various modules. Then, when John(singer/songwriter/guitarist) and I are happy, we save it as John's "whatever" preset. I use one for the ballady type things and one for rock. It's now a done deal for him, and I need to see if my pitch problems can be fixed. I can match tones no problem, but to find the note whilst just hearing a chord is, well.......like rocket science.
 

Try melodyne.Can't hurt. I recently did a vocal track in an uncomfortable key, and I found that adding a little of the tube emulation in pro channel really smoothed it out without actually adding real distortion.  Judicious use of these two worked great.I went one further and added some T-rax white opto compressor (the 2A one) helped strengthen it.

My advice: Embrace your voice. Write the melodies to your voice's strengths.
 
Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Tiny Tim (lol) and many more can't all be wrong...
 
Regards,
Dan
 

Try some free amp sims. There are gobs of them available. Run them in parallel and experiment with compression and EQ before and after the sim. One trick is to boost the midrange from ~1 kHz to ~4 KHz, distort, and then cut the same frequencies by the same amount. Crush the sh*t out of it and you can get a kind of Green Day type crunch.

Your voice is fine, in fact I'd say very good.  Perhaps try a little less hard (AKA relax a bit more).

Sing at an angle up into the mic to help open & relax the throat and its 'singing bits'*.  Make sure your throat is warm (some hot honey and lemon perhaps) and steer clear of phlegm/mucus producing foods for a couple days before recording (i.e. dairy and wheat products).

Listening to yourself is a bit like seeing yourself in a photo; you finally see** how others see you, not how you usually see yourself, so it's always a bit weird; your visual mirror image has its nose pulled out through the back of your head***, and your own voice is highly modified by your bony sound-box (skull).
 
I thought originally this thread was for advice on how to treat a vocal part to make it ugly (e.g. lo-fi, bit-reduction type stuff) :-)

* - a medical term
** - see meaning hear, or see, or both
*** - mirrors do NOT reverse left and right