Vance Powell walks through his signature three-chain parallel vocal system, routing a single vocal bus through three simultaneous processing paths and blending them together in the mix.
The first chain, Vocal Clean, runs through an 1176 with a few dB of compression doing light peak control.
The second, Vocal Crush, sends the same signal into an Empirical Labs Fatso pushed to maximum warmth and heavy compression, producing a dense, crushed parallel layer that contrasts with the dynamic character of the clean chain.
The third chain, Vocal Buzz, is where it gets unusual. Powell traces this approach back to a session with Jack White, who suggested driving a Neve 1073 mic pre into overdrive by pulling the tape output directly into the preamp. Powell now replicates this using the UA 1073 plugin, pushing the mic pre gain up around 30 dB and then pulling the fader back down by the same amount. EQ is flat, other than taking a little bit of low end out with the low cut set at 60Hz. The result is a layer of harmonic distortion that sits under the other two chains, adding texture without obvious grit.