A little compressor goes a long way...

A good compressor/limiter is one of the greatest tools you can have as a recording engineer. It smoothes out the sound, making the loud parts a little less jarring and the soft parts a little more audible. 

I'm not talking about the kind of insane compression of some EDM tracks where you feel like your ears are being sucked out of your head. If you look at the waveform for those tracks, it's pretty much a flat line.

I'm talking about a gentle 6-8 db reduction of the audio signal that helps you actually hear everything that' s going on in the track.

For many, many years I've had a dbx 266 stereo compressor/limiter in my outboard rack, and I would bet that 90% of the tracks we've recorded for Omni have gone through that box. It has a warmth and clarity I just love, and you can barely notice what it's doing.

I have a Urei 1176 too that I use for vocals, but for my money, the engineers at dbx designed something incredibly useful that every recording studio should have.