Vocal Processing: Crafting a signature vocal sound for the album

I want all the vocals on this album to have a distinct sound that's different from my basic Hostess Mostess sound. Now that I have a few vocal tracks recorded, I'm going to try to find a good processing chain that makes a sound I like that I've never tried before.

I'll come back to edit this post as I work on the sound. Here's the chain I'm building:

1. Recording Setup: Use my Sure SM58beta with a pop filter and a lot of headroom. Sing about 1" away from the head and aim directly at it or off-axis by 30 degrees or less.
2. Mix Bus: Run all vocal tracks that do the same thing (lead vox with doubled vox, background vox acting together) into common audio busses. This lets me pan vocals into the bus, then process the vocals together as one common stereo track.
   
3. Clip Gain: Hand smooth each track to even out loud and soft spots. Use automation lines and splitting the tracks into pieces. This can be time-intensive so do a rough job first and listen a lot to find the ugly spots, then refine just those.
4. Subtractive EQ: This I need to experiment with. Do I do it on individual tracks or on the bus? Find the frequencies that stink and pick some frequency space that the vocals will own in every mix.
5. Compression: find the right attack-release settings to keep the dynamics smooth without losing the transients of the consonants. This might have to be applied to each track, not to the common bus.
   
6. Saturation: Find an amp setting that adds some overdrive to some frequency range. I rarely do this to vocals so let's try it. Possibly split the chain and add different types to mix together?
7. Secret Sauce: find something I like (flange, chorus, reverse-reverb, stereo delay with a gate-limit, etc.) and make this the secret sauce for all the songs.
   
8. Add Room Sound: Use an aux send to add delay and reverb so I can automate the levels throughout the songs. Try to make every song sound like it was recorded in the same space.

So hopefully at the end I'll have a signal chain that defines the sound of the album vocals to make a coherent and distinctive sound. Wish me luck!