Curious if anyone has any recommendations.
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OTO Boum, Erica Synths Fusion Box, Sherman Filterbank
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Sherman Filterbank and H9 here. Sherman is a beast in good and bad. Heat with presets must be much easier to use, but Sherman is great for experimentation.
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Warped vinyl, maybe.
I used to love SP404 to get anything through the Vinyl FX. I believe it could be a cheap FX box, nowadays…
Strymon Deco is good for this as well.
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All of the Dreadbox pedals.
Any audio processor that adds significant nonlinearity to a signal can be used. This includes amps with tubes or transformers, certain compressors etc. For example, I’ve read that some mixing engineets love the sound of transformers so much that they have made DIY transformer-on-a-wire cables, and just use these to inject ”fatness” into any channel they want…
Now then, which particular flavour of nonlinearity sounds pleasing and desirable to you? That’s a much more difficult question to answer…
One relatively cheap source of nonlinearity can be a tube mic preamp (doesnt have to be a boutique tube amp!) . I use one dbx 386 with upgraded ”vintage” tubes inside, and it works pretty great as a stereo DI box… especially love it on A4.
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Ahh sorry no. Its just something I remember reading about in the last 18 years of my ”research” 
You know how it goes, you pick up bits and pieces along the way, and in the end you cant remeber exactly where each nugget in your head came from…
However I don’t have reason to doubt this. Certain transformers add nice ”hair” to high freqs and can introduce euphonic low freq distortion. It’s just a matter of being intimate with transformers and knowing which (sowter, cairnhill, lundahl, custom? etc) tranny gives what kind of an effect. Obviously the trannies that are considered ”high end” will behave more linearly…
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Empirical Labs Distressor is a famous one.
There is now a UAD approximation of it.
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Do you mean Dreadbox?
This can be it’s very own wormhole and can cost an absolute fortune. Thermonic Culture have a variety of products, but the Culture Vulture is often raved about. It does cost a few Heat’s though, but as others have said above, it depends on what sounds good to you. Overdriving the inputs on an analog mixing desk, using the gains on a dj mixer…and I have not even mentioned plug-ins.
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How about an old tape deck? I used to have a Tascam Portastudio and I rather liked the sound it imparted. I sold it to help fund my Octatrack but have been thinking about getting another one or some Panasonic or Sony tape deck just to give my tunes an added layer of noise.
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More filth than warmth, but this looks cool http://www.ratdistortion.com/product/366/rat-tail-distortion
OTO boum
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also remember that ”warmth/fatness” is a very vague description, and even certain forms of processing, such as strategic subtractive EQuing (with a razor sharp digital eq no less!), can result in a perception of added warmness etc. You’d be surprised what a difference it can make sometimes to tame wild resonances from a signal, it can sometimes sound like running through some ”mojo adding” hardware 
However, this opinion is not sexy, its boring… you don’t need new gear to do this 
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check out fusion box
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Do you have one?
I almost bought one but then noticed the constant clicking noise and artifacts caused by the BBD chips. Do you feel its annoying in practice when using the unit?
I even emailed ericasynths, asking them to consider making a version of fusionbox with more BBD chips inside, in order to get rid of the BBD artifacts…
Have to admit, that tube amp stage and the flanging on the fusionbox sounds glorious though!
Personally use a Niio Analogue Track Thickener… kind of a rack version on the AHeat. Stereo, 5 saturation types. mild cross-over filter and modular like combining of clean and distorted paths, VCA with amplitude envelope & trigger input(nice), passive 2 band eq. A newer version called Iotine Core with more advancements might be easier to source.
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Old Boss KM- and BX-series mixers, and many other older analogue mixers too, in fact.
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