The plate is the default vocal reverb for a mechanical reason. A plate's reflections are dense enough that the tail reads as a single wash rather than a series of echoes, so it gives a voice a space without adding a rhythm that competes with the phrasing. And because a plate is dispersive, with the high frequencies of every reflection arriving ahead of the lows, the front of the tail carries a bright, fast burst that sits just behind the consonants. That is the "expensive vocal" sound people chase.
What follows is an order of operations for putting one on a lead vocal. The control names are from Plate Daddy, but the thinking carries over to any plate.
Set it up on a send, then pick the plate
Put the plate on an aux or return track and send the vocal to it, with the reverb's Mix fully wet. A send lets you ride the amount with a fader, lets backing vocals share the same space, and means anything you do to the reverb (filtering, ducking) happens to the reverb alone and never touches the dry voice.
Then choose the plate before you touch a knob. The plate model sets the character more than any single control does, because each one is a different tension and material with its own amount of dispersion. Plate Daddy has seven: Big Steel, Steel SS, Gold Foil, Eco, Bronze, Pocket and Chrome. Gold Foil is the most restrained and Chrome has the most pronounced chirp. On a vocal that is already bright, or a sibilant singer, start toward the restrained end; on a dark or breathy voice, a plate with more chirp adds the top end the recording lacks, without an EQ boost on the vocal itself. Loop a phrase and step through a few plates before going further.
Once you have a candidate, go to the Tweak page and turn Dispersion to zero for a moment. The plate turns into an ordinary reverb, a perfectly usable one, and the vocal loses that bright leading edge. Bring it back. Hearing the difference once tells you how much of what you liked was the chirp, and that tells you how far to push it.
Decay, pre-delay and the space between voice and tail
Set Decay by feel, not by number. Plate Daddy's Decay runs from 0.15 to 30 seconds, and most of that range is for effects: anything past a few seconds stops sounding like a space the singer is in and starts sounding like an event of its own. For a vocal, listen to where the tail ends relative to the next phrase. If the reverb from one line is still audibly hanging when the next begins, the words start to blur; if it vanishes the moment the voice stops, it is doing little that a dry vocal does not. Fast, wordy parts usually want a shorter decay than slow, sustained ones. The readout under the knob gives you the number when you want to note it down.
Next, Pre-Delay. This is the most useful single control for vocal reverb. Delaying the onset of the reverb by a few tens of milliseconds lets each consonant land dry before the tail arrives, so the voice stays in front of its own reverb without the reverb getting any quieter. Without pre-delay, the start of every word is smeared by its own reflections and the only fix is to turn the send down, which also takes the space away. With it, you can often run more reverb than you would have thought, and the vocal still reads as close to the listener.
Then shape the tail's tone. A vocal reverb rarely needs the full frequency range. Low Cut removes the low end of the tail, which is where reverb turns into mud, particularly on a male voice or anything recorded close to the microphone. High Cut takes the edge off a tail that is catching sibilance. On the Tweak page, High Damp does the related job inside the tank, making the high frequencies die away sooner than the rest of the tail, and Low Decay shortens or lengthens the bottom of the tail separately from the Decay control. A common vocal shape is a tail that is lighter at both ends than the voice itself: enough body to sound like a room, not so much that it thickens the mix.
Keeping the tail out of the words
The last problem on a vocal is that the reverb is loudest right when the singer is loudest, which is exactly when you need it least. Duck solves that. It pulls the reverb down while the source is playing and lets it back up in the gaps, so the space blooms between phrases rather than on top of them. On a busy mix this is the difference between a vocal that sounds washed out and one that sounds big: the reverb is just as loud, it is simply arriving where there is room for it.
A few other controls earn their place on a vocal plate. Modulation adds slow movement to the tail, which can stop a long reverb sounding static; use it lightly on a voice, since pitch movement in the tail is more noticeable against a sustained note. Width sets how wide the reverb spreads, and narrowing it slightly can keep a lead vocal's space from competing with wide backing parts. Drive adds grit to the reverb, which is worth trying on a rock vocal and rarely wanted on a ballad. Freeze holds the tank indefinitely, turning the last word of a line into a pad, which makes a good transition effect when you automate it on for a bar.
If the plate still sounds too big, pull the send down before you shorten the decay. A long tail at a low level often sounds more natural on a voice than a short one at a high level, because the ear hears the length of a room before it hears its loudness.
To try this on your own vocal, put Plate Daddy on a send with a 14-day free trial of the full version. Pick a plate, set pre-delay first, then turn Duck up and listen to how much more reverb the vocal will take before the words start to blur.