Jeff Ellis, Grammy-winning mixer known for Doja Cat and Frank Ocean, walks through what he calls the vocal chain death spiral: a session where a producer has stacked plugin after plugin until the vocal sounds like, in his words, spittle and mouth noises. His fix is not to rebuild from scratch but to start bypassing.
The core insight is that compressors make things sound smaller, not bigger. The sense of size you get from a packed chain usually comes from the small gain boosts each plugin adds, not from any actual improvement in the sound. Volume-match the processed and unprocessed versions, and the cleaner one almost always has more bounce, expression, and personality.
Ellis A/Bs a rap vocal with roughly 15 plugins against a version with just two, and the difference is immediate. The over-processed version buries the rapper's delivery under sibilance and harshness. The stripped version lets the craft of the performance come through.
He's careful not to frame this as a rule. Some songs live in the overprocessed aesthetic and that's legitimate. The goal is to find the version that carries the most emotion, and that means being honest about whether you're adding processing because it serves the performance or because it feels like progress.