What’s an affordable hardware bass guitar compressor?

Hello All:

I've noticed that commercial productions have a much more squashed low-end dynamic range than my own recordings.

Can anyone provide their general step by step for recording, mixing, and mastering Bass?

I know its generally a good idea to compress in stages - during tracking, during mixing, and at the mastering stage. Which ratio and threshold settings do you use at each stage? attack / release settings?