Okay, I'm sure this has been posted before by someone handsomer than I but I'm fairly new to this forum and was put here to be redundant and annoying by reposting perfectly milked subjects (okay, hopefully not).
SO...Is there a piece of gear that is considered to be rather lame in general or really bad for it's advertised function that you use with GREAT success on some recording (or maybe it's some piece of gear that nobody really knows about or knows that it works well for some hidden function)? Let's say some bad reverb unit that you overdrive the input on for some amazing 8 bit drum distortion or some absolutely hated preamp that just happens to be the best thing you've ever used on gothic jaw harp or maybe some pedal that was meant for chorus on guitar but you use only it's output gain as a vocal booster/superthickener/hitmakerer...
Okay people, you weren't gonna go to the grave with this stuff anyway, right? It's time to praise that piece of crap for the icon it should have been!
A couple for me:
boss hyperfuzz (meant for guitars) someone turned me onto this for bass and holy macaroni, it's evil!
ART tube MP ($50-ish)- someone left one of these at my place once years ago and I thought I'd stick it on a snare drum for a song. I had the gain too hot on the input and the tube was driven pretty hard. It gave me a great harmonic sizzly compressed thing that I still love to this day! (though I haven't used that trick in a while (where is that thing anyway?)
mckay
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I'm sure that some of you out there have tried this before but I
I'm sure that some of you out there have tried this before but I like to use a lot of guitar fx on main vocals. I record a lot of hardcore/metal bands with "singers" that can't believe how thin their voice sounds when you record only one take. More often than not I will do two or three passes to beef up the "cookie monster" vocals but sometimes I get a "singer" that doesn't want to do multiple takes. When that happens what I do is first double the track, then pitch shift the doubled track 5-10 cents up or down and put either an overdriven tube effect on the voice or some type of guitar distortion. Dpending how the two tracks sound together you may need to delay the 2nd track a bit. This will help sort out any comb filtering and also helps to add a little more dimension to the vocals. I then mix the doubled track in beneath the original track to taste and there you go; really beefy, mean sounding vocals.
I've also used a 57 as a weapon on stage before but I don't really suggest doing that. The mic still works by the way.