Thomas Juth shows how he uses an 1176 to keep a lead vocal sitting in a consistent dynamic pocket, watching the gain reduction meter and aiming for roughly 1 to 2 dB rather than chasing perfect consistency.
His settings: slow attack, fast release, 4:1 ratio. That combo lets transients through while taming sustained energy, which keeps the vocal feeling alive instead of squashed.
Input and output stay near unity. To push the compression harder, he drives the signal into the 1176 with clip gain or gain from an earlier stage, rather than touching the compressor's own knobs.
Once the vocal sits reliably in that range, he commits and bounces it to a new file, treating that print as the real starting point for the rest of the mix.