If you are just talking about setting the EQ on your consol/plugin while you are recording for the purposes of monitoring (as opposed to recording through the EQ where the settings will actually be recorded), then it makes no difference what you do. You can put whatever you want on the track. It in not permanent. Once your whole song is finished, you will most likely have to readjust everything anyway... you can't really properly EQ/process a track without having it in context of the entire mix.
If you are talking about actually recording through the EQ causing the EQ settings to be recorded to your track... I would not suggest you do that.
Like I already mentioned: If you do not have the track in the context of the entire mix, you can't know how to process it. In "mixing", each track is relative to all the other tracks.
Unless you have some amazing outboard gear that you want to record through for the "flavor" of that unit, I would not record any processing... and even if you do have that amazing piece of gear that you want the "flavor" of, I would run through it without it really doing anything significant to the audio... remember, anything you DO can never be UNDONE.
And I certainly would never gate a signal on the way in and I would never roll anything off a vocal on the way in. Like I said, you don't know what you will need until you are in the mix, and once the processing is there, it is there forever.