bitflipper


I had to look up the Cranesong Phoenix, because it's a TDM plugin and I've never used it. Basically, it's a tape saturation emulator. They're a dime-a-dozen in the VST world. It's gentle compression and a little even-harmonic distortion. 

It's not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think "thickening", although I suppose it sort of does that because of the compression.
(That's the trouble with non-technical descriptions such as "thickening". Or "fattening", "sweetening", "warming", or (gag) "making it more musical". All are uncomfortably vague for me. Or the one that really gets my goat: "adding mojo" (sorry, IKM).)

Nowadays, thickening is usually accomplished by overdubbing the vocal 2 or 3 times, time-aligning and Cher-ifying all three and panning them slightly apart, and then shifting one overdub up by a few cents and the other down by the same amount. Smash the whole thing with über-compression. That's pretty much the stock signature pop vocal sound of the past decade.

yup... a touch of tape distortion, compression, layer a few tracks and if you did it right, it sounds fatter, sweeter, warmer. Screw it up, too much of any of the above and you got a mess on your hands. 

jps


Maybe relevant for this topic :

http://youtu.be/FM6uNvRzSjU

All the best
Jan

Good Vid ; )

Assuming the vocal is not too bad pitchwise, I make a clone of the original vocal, and use Melodyne (Autotune does the same), to bring every note to full correction.  Because not every note is off by the same amount, the effect is not static.  It changes with however far from perfect the original recording is.  If you use it too prominantly, it just sounds like a perfectly timed double, but add just a little, and the magic happens.  There are variations of this technique, where more or less correction is added to more clones, but the basic concept is the same.