It starts with the recording of the vocals. Good mic, good room, good levels, and good voice are what you need. Use Reaper's take feature to get at least 8 tracks for each section of the song. Cycle thy rough your 8 takes, pick the best parts, cut, paste, and glue them. Using takes always gets me excellent vocal tracks, but there are almost always phasing and volume issues between the different segments I've pieced together. Solution? Compress the hell out of it. Sometimes I've even automated EQs to help with phasing problems. After all that, use whatever FX suit the song and sit her in the mix. Sometimes, you may want to dip your track, pan them hard L and R, then put a delay on one of them, turn the dry mix, pre-delay, and feedback all the way down and give it 10-25 ms of delay. Sometimes it's good for a song, sometimes it's not. Mind you, I'm talking lead vox here. Backups are a completely different beast. More fun and a bit more involved.
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