Signature Series Vocals

[Sabel Kantah]

ButchVig helped to marshal in the entire concept of 'distorted vocals on purpose' when working with legendary bands such as Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Garbage. His mixes tend to have vocals sitting right out front, unapologetically in your face. Continuing their trend of giving you a 'producer in a plugin', Waves has created the Butch Vig Vocals offering in their signature artist series. I slapped it on a vocal track and here's what I found out.

This should go without saying, but even I need to remind myself occasionally: try to craft your vocal sound in the mix. I'm often surprised by how many producers I work with will spend countless hours tweaking a vocal sound isolated, then put the vocal in the mix and be surprised that they have to start all over again. With a plugin like BVV, you're going to want to tweak it sitting in the whole mix. Butch Vig Vocals is unapologetically aggressive in its processing power. The compressor can absolutely squeeze the heck out of things, and the filters will decimate frequency information from a vocal signal. The crazy thing is, it all truly works together to get you a really 'grungy' vocal sound within seconds.

The Waves Signature Series essentially puts a lot of different processors all into one interface, allowing the user to re-create the signal chain of various famous producers and recording engineers. In this case, BVV is no different. Everything you need to work with vocals is here. There is a compressor, a de-esser, discrete input and output levels, specifically tuned EQ choices, (we'll get to that in a minute), and tube/solid state preamp saturation.

On top of your traditional vocal channel processing controls, the tube and solid-state saturation controls allow you to dial in your favorite type of distortion. After working with the plugin for a bit, I can confirm that the 2 options sound dramatically different, and 'break up' your signal in different ways.

The second example enables the Butch Vig Vocal plugin on both the lead and backing vocal track. I went for an aggressive sound, and you can clearly hear the vocals sitting a bit on top of the mix (as well as quite a bit of pleasant sounding distortion):

My only little gripe is that the 'steampunk' type interface can sometimes be distracting when making adjustments. It looks cool at first glance, but the color scheme can occasionally make it hard to find what you're looking for.

Matt Vanacoro is one of New York's premier musicans. Matt has collaborated as a keyboardist in studio and on stage with artists such as Jordan Rudess (Dream Theater), Mark Wood (Trans-Siberian Orchestra), Mark Rivera (Billy Joel Band), Aaron Carter, Amy Regan, Jay Azzolina, Marcus Ratzenboeck (Tantric), KeKe Palmer, C-Note, Jordan Knig... Read More

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