Here’s two hot tips for the dark art of compression…
Clip gain!
By going through the track and trimming down the peaks and bringing up the quiet sections manually Pre compressor, you are reducing the extremes of the dynamic range the compressor has to deal with.
stacked compressors
Rather than have one compressor doing a hole lot of work, set two different compressors and halve the load! Try setting the first one in the chain to limit the peaks – fast attack, fast release, then set the second one as the glue with a slow attack and slow release.
combining these two techniques will really help to get you a very smooth and even vocal without any obvious compression effects or pumping!
Happy mixing!