For bass guitar I regard compression as very useful, and for acoustic-electric guitar with piezo pickups, I regard compression as essential and indispensible.
I use a Boss BC-1X and a tc electronic SpectraComp, for which I have written my own custom toneprint, documented in a thread somewhere here.
It does take a bit to program a multiband digital compressor like the SpectraComp, but its flexibility is unmatched. The thing about compression is, it's not one thing, it's many things, depending on how you set it up, but whether or not you can make any given compressor do more than one thing is entirely dependent on how much access you have to the parameters that matter.
The right kind of compressor, set the right way, can do things to your signal that no amount of skill in your fingers can do. Not all compressors can do this for you, however.
The big mistake a lot of people make is thinking that the only purpose of compressors is to knock down peaks so that the average level is more consistent, and it's because of this that a lot of people disdain the use of compression and will tell you you just need to practice more so your dynamics are more even.
But, compressors can also be used to effectively do the opposite of compression, which is called "expansion" (and unit that does both is a "compander"). The easiest way to do this is by setting your compressor to have a relatively slow attack time, so that it allows the transient peak of your note to pass unhindered, and then closes down on the body of the note, increasing the relative difference between the peak and the body of the note. Suddenly, you aren't decreasing dynamic range, you're increasing it.
A fully featured compressor should allow you to control independently:
attack time (how quickly the compressor compresses)
release time (how quickly the compressor stops compressing)
threshold (at what volume level the compressor starts compressing)
ratio (how much the compressor actually compresses once it starts compressing)
knee (how smoothly the compressor transitions between compressing and not compressing)
makeup gain (how much the signal is amplifed after the compressor)
This is my main bass guitar pedalboard. My compressor is always on. This board is designed to be used with my Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay fretless with piezo pickups, hence the Acoustic Preamp, which I turn off when I am playing with the magnetic pickups. This setup seems to sound better to me when I put the AD-2 before the BC-1X, than the other way around.
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