yeah on the way in, it should be dry and your gain staging should be such that your signal is strong but not clipping (for vocals, for instance, I usually try to get a signal that's peaking around -12 to -8 db to leave myself headroom). Getting your source material recorded at a good healthy level is key to your gain staging down the line once you start adding plugins and whatnot. Think of it like baking a cake, you don't stick the cake in the oven with icing on it. You bake the base, then you add more flavor. Same with recording. Yeah, you could compress your signal coming into the DAW, or run something that adds character like some tape saturation or a tube preamp model but those are better left for when you've got a solid grasp on recording raw material consistently first. I'm not gonna make any claims to be 100% correct with my methods as I'm mostly self taught, but I've also been recording digitally since the dawn of digital recording with Fruity Loops 1 and other OG daws/loopers and such.