I am looking at ways into producing dark distorted male vocals for insudtrial style tracks. So I was wondering if anyone could recommend some good VST plugins to try. Possibly a chain of plugins?

Ideally these will be freeware but paid ones also considered. I have a UAD-1 and Powercore cards so these plugins can also be considered. At the moment I am experimenting with using a compressor such as 1176LN followed by Argotlunar (http://argotlunar.info/) to give the vocal some 'dirt'

So maybe a good compressor, something to rough it up a bit and a bit of EQ? Am I missing anything that might add something?


IdeaS for chains/techniques for making a vocal sound more dark/rough/dirty are welcome Tips for how to use the plugins to get the desired effect would also help.

Thanks

NI Guitar Rig is really good at doing what you want. I love putting guitar distortions on vocals. Sometimes, not so good. Sometimes you can get this unearthly wonderful distort. You just have to play around with it.

I would recommend Gate > De esser > compressor > distortion (ohmicide is what I use for vocal distortion but there are great free ones as well) > reverb/delay

pitchshifter's and modulation effects are effective for the styles of music you are describing also. i would put them pre distortion but they can be good anywhere in the chain. Free distortions that I have used on vocals to good effect are:

boogex
cyanide
christortion
some freely drawable waveshaper which I unfortunately don't have anymore

the rs met pitchshifter plug is great for odd vocals too

CamelCrusher

Indeed.



This one? (Cyanide 2)

I also like to use a vocoder with white noise (perhaps filtered) as the carrier on vox. Works best layered under a more-intelligible copy of the vocal.

You may also want to check out Psycho Toolkit- kinda old, but some good stuff in there for messing up vocals (or whatever else)- not free, but definitely worth the $25. Their namesake plugin (Clone Ensemble) is cool too, if not really what you're asking for specifically here.

This one? (Cyanide 2)

[/quote]
not cyanide. it was not smoothed in the way cyanide is. it basically let you draw in a shape with the mouse, but you could make some really jagged transfer curves. It was also a fixed point processor so it would hard clip anything over zero. It was plain whit and capable of some of the grossest distortion I've ever heard.

The vocoder white noise is good. I use vokator for that trick.

I don't think I know that one, it does sound cool though.

It was part of pluggo!!!! Just remembered. I haven't installed pluggo on my last 2 systems because it screws up my ilok. I think it was just called waveshaper.

Thanks for the tips guys, especially for the vocoder with white noise idea.

multiband distortion is your friend. Take Kombinat for instance...kill the lows and use the mid band to get that boxy telephone sound and adjust crunch/dist to get the level of intelligibility you want. On the high band, go crazy with either lots of distortion, bit crush or ring mod and slowly raise the volume of the high band to get the feel of a double tracked distorted whisper or scream vocal.

With Guitar rig etc you can more complicated with routing and splitting tracks, like adding a delay and/or chorus on the high freq 'whisper/scream track'. Endless possibilities.

The flagg mic is great for vocal distortion live. Doesn't feed back. It's made out of a payphone:

http://www.flaggaudio.com/mics.html

It is super cool and is included in the max for live factory effect folder. There is one even cooler than that one in TurboSynth (90's mac program) which Trent Rezner ran almost everything on Downword Spiral through. Trent later also used the Pluggo package and presumably used the waveshaper as the closest thing to the TurboSynth waveshaper that does or ever has existed as far as my research leads me to believe.

And if you want to destroy the signal a bit make sure to check out:

http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/

I also like to use impulse treverbs like altiverb right here:

http://www.musotalk.de/video/altiverb-7-audioease-faltungsha ll-test/

(altiverb is not free sadly...) and then i put the impulse to reverse (just subtle mixing that in). That creates a unique weird sound. For Distortion i use Guitar rigs nice Amps etc![/url]

Old, probably forgotten, but interestingly evil : CloneEnsemble Psycho Toolkit

Was checking this out and came across these for about 10% of the price. They have specs very similar to the Flag mic minus the XLR connector.