Let's think of the mic as the car, the preamp as the engine, outputs to the recorder as the road, and the compressor like cruise control, with the volume being the speed.
When you need to use the car you start the engine. The preamp powers the mic, hence the mic is plugged into the pre. Into the channel insert, you put the compressor, setting the amount of gain reduction just enough to do what's needed, keeping volume in check.(Keep in mind that a compressor started out as a "leveling amplifier" originally designed to amplify a signal. When you track try not to increas the output volume or you will add noise.) When you make a sound into the mic, it's like putting it into drive, with everything else set right you are good to send the signal to your recorder. You can send to the recorder from a number of spots. Four streets, if you will. First, you can send from the "direct out" from each channel. This is can be both post fader, and pre fader, meaning that the fader will control your output to tape or it won't.
You can send to tape from the direct out for the subgroups, if you do this you can combine signals on one track easily. You can also take an output from the aux's to tape. If you do that you can mix sounds that have already been recorded woth new sounds, on to separate tracks without disturbing the original. You can take an output from the master l
output, into a 2 tr recording, and record everything to stereo at once.
So, Mic -to- channel(compressor inserted) -to- channel out, or sub out, or aux out, or l/r out-to-tape recordercomputer.

All of this is acceptable, as long as the levels are set right. :c:

Nice answer Steve.. I would like to add that depending on the quality of your mixer, you may wish to completely bypass it on the way into your recorder, be it a stand alone or a DAW.. To do this simply patch out of the mic pre outs into the eq and then compressor. You may also go out of the pre into the comp and then eq. You can get totally different sounds doing this.. You would then use your mixer to monitor only the outs of the recorder.. This has the advantage of never passing your recorded signal through a cheap mixer that may degrade or damage the audio signal.. Unless you have a very good large format console, this is usually the way to go... Kurt

Thank you so much guys. I especially needed to hear that part about bypassing the mixer Kurt! It seems like good cheap pres and comps are out there, but there really isn't a mixer for my budget. I have an old Yamaha pm-40 that I'm pretty sure I won't be using once I've got a few vtb-1s! This site is so cool. Thanks again.
Beau.
http://www.beaulandry.com