Hi Guys
Well this sounds like a challenge right up my street because I am busy recording this track (with Lebz on guitar) as part of an album to sell at our National Arts Festival in July.
Please note: I always obtain the necessary licenses from CAPASSO for cover songs when I produce these albums to sell at my live shows. Here is my acapella lead vocal. I would love feedback on what you think I could do to improve on it. I will post the finished version a little later.
Your vocal sounds good. Even, balanced. Good amount of reverb. (none of the distortion that used to show up).
The final result will, of course, depend on how it sounds with whatever tracks it sits in - it needs a context to really know.
But... compared to the Sheeran vocal, yours is fairly "conventional". That is not a "bad" thing... it is conventional. The Sheeran vocal obviously has a whole different kind of processing going on. I hear something that sounds like a Rotary Speaker plugin has been used on it. There is definitely some delay (or a lot of it), too. I'm not hearing a delay in yours (did you use one?).
I have never gone down this rabbit hole before - the one about "how are current, 'modern' vocals processed". So any comments regarding how those vocals are processed are guesses - and since I have never used a rotary plugin on anything, it is simply based on "I think I hear this"...