How do they make vocal's so polished?

[Vincent]

I have watch 2 different things about def leppard and saw where the singer would be singing and thru the mixer his voice would be thin and dry and then with a press of a button all of a sudden the vocals were huge and fuller and polished. Does anyone know what might have been done to cause such a huge difference with the vocals.

Did they just press a vocal bus where a lot of vocal takes were sent to a bus and then were layered?

Do they usually add the reverb at the vocal bus or apply it straight to the vocal channel?

What effect might they have used to make the vocals sound so much fuller, delay, chorus, ect...?

The song was love bites from hysteria.

Thank you in advance for any info.
Peace and God bless,
Vincent

[TimOBrien]

A few million dollars worth of equipment in a multi-million dollar studio renting out for many thousands of dollars an hour.

...plus an engineer or two with 20 or more years experience.

[three15]

whats up... layering the sound is a good fix for that but im not sure how much of that is down in a larger arena where the sound is gonna already get a tremendous amout of extra reverb and echo. i feel like if they did layer then maybe the they might also eq some of the lower-end freq out of the voice to eliminate as much hangover in sounds as possible without completing thinnin out the voice. post something if you find out...

[JeffBarnett]

I couldn't tell you how Def Leppard did it, but generally speaking, the answer is lots of processing - effects like EQ, sometimes vocal doubling, compression / limiting, pitch correction. Lots of things.

Although they may have had all of that assigned to a bus for an easy before/after comparison, there is no magic button that will do all of that for you, nor is it going to be the same for every voice or style of vocal. It just takes time to experiment and sort out what works best for you.

[SwD]

I wonder about that as well. I wonder also how you add "warmth" to a vocal track. Do you have to use tube preamps and special mics, or can it be added later on through delay and reverb etc?

Will using preamps like the Saffire that goes straight to digital add any depth and tone to a track or will it sound too brittle and dry?

[fLiPaudio]

did it occur to anyone that a polished vocal starts with a polished vocalist...all the processing in the world can't create something that wasn't there...only enhance it

[SwD]

Of course a polished vocalists help. That's a given. As is the mic, preamp, etc.

But I think I heard the Def Leppard exemple (not totally sure, it was a while back) and it was indeed a HUGE difference between the dry signal and the processed vocal sound.