Consider every sound you use of having an envelope ( ADSR ), work on those envelopes to alter the dynamic amplitude of a sound, wether it's a sample, an analogue sound or a preset from a rompler.
Record every sound/instrument as loud as possible and keep in mind that compression/limiting/expanding is a subtle factor to accent a sound, not a raping factor. But both can be good yet the first one is the " normal " approach.
Drums, Bass, yep, they're mono, keep em like that. There's the need to keep notice upon how to master for media purpose, i.e. vynil does not handle stereo-enhancers/bass-expanders very well. I know we're not talking mastering here, but it is important during your production hours not to use a lot of these fx. The basic unmastered track should be as dry as possible and as loud as possible, when mastering the full track you add compression, fx etc and balance out the instrument tracks. Than normalize to -0.1 dB or even better, balance out your track without normalising up to -0.1dB.
Gate, gate, gate . . . Drums Drums Drums. Clean up the mess between drumhits, or not, it's a personal preference but it makes a track tight n tidy.
Also, there are recordings n instruments which you don't or absolutly should not compress/expand or limit. This goes for contra basses for example, a good player has practiced for years upon bringing forth the acoustic dynamics of his contra bass. You bet your ass on it that he would not appreciate it if you screw up his work by altering his hard trained skills. But these go for acoustics, you shouldn't worry about the rompler in your triton ( example ).
ALSO!!!!!!!!! Bass is fucking nice, but don't overdo it, you have no idea what it does on a 8 kW PA system. If you exceed a bit your mids disappear in the same fashion, so again, little eq, little compression.
