Voice Effects

w/o lsitening to your clips which are studio recordings and could eb all manner of things treating the vocal track, let me make a general budget-friendly suggestion;

if you already have guitar effects in the styles you need, you can try running your mic into a passive direct box backwards to get a HI Z, unbalanced signal into your effects chain and then run that into a line input on the PA or console/interface, this is a fast and dirty approach to interfacing guitar gear with studio and sound reinforcement gear, but it works well enough for what you're talking about attempting... I've done a fancier version of this in the studio, slapping recorded vocals back through a high gain guitar amp or an old tube tape machine driving a PA cab using a radial reamp but I also shared a bill with a band a few times who used a cheap, whirlwind passive DI in reverse as I described to put the vocals into a Proco Rat and DD3 for a dirty slapback sound that suited their style. They just sued the stage mics provided by the venue too, just yanked the vocal mic outta input 1, stuck into the DI and gave th engineer an unbalanced line return from the effects to an unused channel allowing him to leave the channel 1 vocal sound up for bands like mine with a conventional vocal sound on stage.

At the end of my band's run we started taking a small rack with a channel strip and some processors to get our vocal sound consistent and we borrowed this other band's approach giving the engineer our singer's sound to mix in on an used channel as he saw fit, but with all the effects presets dialed in to sound like her no matter how small the shows (the shows ahd gotten pretty lame at the end).

electrical face palm, ya dangus

Jim nailed it & that's all ya need- These might be down the road thoughts...

Here's other nonsense on that topic. You're not alone obviously-loads of people use pedals like rack gear ($500 on a Big Sky Pedal?! Milk it!) & for tho who wanna there are people who make gear just for it-(tho it's the same +/- some whistles/ bells/extras & convenience)

The Radial "Voco-Loco" to match levels/impedance etc. & plug in all your pedals just how you like & give your house sound guy the output XLR cable. Fun to fuck with things real time if you want too. Oh yeah, it has a phase switch & phantom power too. Think $100ish (way more than a DI)

If you wanna permanently have this set up in your home studio Radial makes the EXTC for a 500 series rack space & I think a stand alone DI box type thing as well? Not crazy economical, but I love having a permenent insert/send wired into my studio for pedals in my 500 rack. I got way tired of having to pull out my DI, pedals, etc whenever I wanted to add in pedals. Now it's just right there whenever I want I even made space for several favorite pedals next to it so I just leave my favorites set up or swap out as is called for. (200-250?)

Jim's is where to start for sure tho. Grab a DI box dirt cheap.

An aside on distortion-I've kept a regular Marantz cassette deck wired in for years now. Love hitting it hard for a different kinda distortion. Cheap fun & I've had a bunch of people over the years ask me how I got "that distortion/compression madness". From my home stereo.

you don't have a $20 passive DI? jeez, I have so many I could mail you one... handy utility box. I just assumed everyone had one. I am not talking about a ncie DI like a Radial active or the classic Countryman. We are talking those cheap boxes by Whirlwind and Samson that you find next to the XLR cables in big box guitar/gear retailers...

you can regularly find better passive DIs like the Groovetubes unit for under $20 used on Ebay, I know you can because I bought a passive GT DI for about $15 shipped last year when I was unhappy with the sound of my active Radial and my long-serving Whirlwind passives for taking a line level signal off the speaker out of one of my guitar amps, --NERD ALERT-- but the groovetubes ahs served me well for a lot of other applications, especially in synth world where I might want to patch an effect into a semi modular but I need to switch impedance, convert to and from unbalanced and have some phase flip available before the channels trip I'm recording into.... its also been good to me using the EF86 channel of my Matchless as a standalone tube isntrument preamp taking a balanced lineout off that channel's effects loop while the amp is on a dummy load to protect the transformer.

--DOUBLE NERD ALERT--

What I am suggesting is super low cost and gives you a relatively hifi, noise-free signal (well, as noise free as your stomps are with a guitar plugged in, anyway). Mixing and matching impedances can have a negative inpact on how your effects perform, particularly dirt boxes (maybe it'll be cool, but for a few bucks give yourself some options) and willy nilly going from balanced to unbalanced connections can introduce ground hum if you so much as breathe the wrong way. Want to piss off a soundman? Give him a highly driven vocal signal with a bunch of mains hum! He'll take your vocal outta the mix for spite. An XLR to unbalanced 1/4" is not decoupling pin 3 the same way as a transformer based device. Its a tiny investment to give yourself somewhere to go if your setup is underperfoming. By all means, do whatever works, but if something is working creatively but failing technically one should have the tools to address the problem when they are this cheap.

ask a nerd a question, get a technical answer

Jim's is where to start for sure tho. Grab a DI box dirt cheap.

For the benefit of the OP, lemmee state that it has to be PASSIVE (which is cheaper), a powered DI is a one way street for your signal, HI Z unbalanced (1/4" guitar) to LOW Z balanced (XLR mic), so you need a cheap passive like a Whirlwind. They cost almost nothing, work in reverse, and sound fine for most applications.

The Radial "Voco-Loco" to match levels/impedance etc. & plug in all your pedals just how you like & give your house sound guy the output XLR cable. Fun to fuck with things real time if you want too. Oh yeah, it has a phase switch & phantom power too. Think $100ish (way more than a DI)

I've not tried the Voco Loco, but if its as nice as the Radial reamp, active Radial DIs and Tonebone ABY then I am sure its worth every penny if you can spare the money. $100 sounds reasonable to me, but I allocate a lot of budget to gear since becoming single again.

An aside on distortion-I've kept a regular Marantz cassette deck wired in for years now. Love hitting it hard for a different kinda distortion. Cheap fun & I've had a bunch of people over the years ask me how I got "that distortion/compression madness". From my home stereo.

last time I made a rock record we made a lot of use of an old Wolensac 1 track 1/4" reel to reel with tobe electronics. A $20 pawn shop investment that made a fabulous vocal processor for varying degrees of compression, distortiona nd loftiness (not the ebst designed tube front end for fidelity on these cheap old recorders).... if you find the right one it will have built in speakers with their own tube power amp at about 5 watts a side. Interesting sound from the inbuilt speakers, but if you break out your soldering iron and hack it at the output transofrmer you can drive a guitar cab with it! It even ahs an intersting sound on guitar itself to overload the tube preamp, overload the tape and get the record heads hitting the little power amp and your speaker cab.... Marantz, Wolensac, 3M all made these things in the 50s and 60s and one in good nick shouldn't cost more than $100, probably less. They turn up regularly on fleabay these days.

(1) I have used TC Helicon VoiceLive Play (the blue one) at many wedding/party gigs where odd vocal effects are necessary, and I love it. You have to be careful about the settings though, because if you set too much mic gain, or if the house/PA has too much FX on your mic channel, you can get nasty feedback. Also, there are some cool harmony effects you might enjoy. But definitely plenty of distortion options for voice. I also use their Mic Mechanic at times and love it. Helpful for people like me who can sing pitches well but don't have the best tonal quality.

(2) I am totally copying and pasting Jimmy's answer regarding passive boxes and amp speakers and synth outboard FX loop ... it might take me a year or so to understand what he just said, but I think it's a path of education I'd like to explore :)

Hey Jimmy any chance we could twist your arm into uploading a diagram? (true tech schematic with the little symbols for resisters and such might be too complex for some readers)

not at this particular moment but I will make one in the next week with appropriate impedance values noted and some explanations of why it matters.... maybe I will do a 'wrong way' diagram with impedance info and what you can expect to resulst sonically for creative missuse of gear! sometimes degradation is a sound, right Nick?

thanks for saying "not a schematic" in there more or less, because I assume everyone can read and sonically interpret a schematic because I am a world class loon... I think a I ran a dude off with my schematical musings in an amp thread just yesterday and I was just trying to be informative. We are just not all engineers as well as musicians, and that's okay... but listening to the engineers can only be to your benefit as long as you don't forget the golden tulle, if it sounds good? it is GOOD

I know most of you just wanna make music and not think too hard and that's a laudable goal! and the golden rule I stated is great if you know what to do and have the tools to correct things if it just sounds blah the easy way! can't hurt to know why things sound a certain way either, can it?