What you need are Bode plots. You need a plot of loop gain versus frequency and one of loop phase shift versus frequency. It is also possible to combine these two things into a single plot: a Bode stability plot. This plot has real gain to the left, imaginary gain to the right, and frequency is degrees from the real axis. (A cylindrical graph.) You want it to be heart shaped, with the dip to the right. Phase shift at zero degrees and loop gain at 1.000 must lie outside the heart. Loop gain at 0.2 or less when loop phase shift is zero degrees is excellent. You cannot get there by just pushing poles around. A lot of the poles are fixed by device characteristics (like transistor gain-bandwidth rolloff), or by parasitic elements, like collector-base capacitance. Usually, the first amplifier stage will have most of the gain (speaking of audio amplifiers now). This usually insures that it will have the first rolloff. We add capacitance to make this the dominant rolloff and establish its position. The first stage has most of the gain for reasons of noise, voltage slewing, and power. It is first, so it will set the noise limit. If it is followed by additional gain, it has reduced slew demand, which is compatible with high gain parameters, and the less the power demand, the more gain can be obtained. If other rolloffs are too near and phase shift is excessive, we have three ways to fix this: reduce the loop gain; lower the dominant rolloff; raise the other rolloffs. Roffoffs can be raised by lowering the R or lowering the C, or applying local feedback. For example, add an emitter resistor to a stage to get degeneration in that stage. Now you can use poles and zeros manipulation. Bypass the degeneration resistor and you get a frequency boost and a phase shift reduction, but beware. When the gain boost runs out, you go down and shift at twice the rate. I hope this all is some help. Remember, everything walks around with device tolerances, temperature, voltage, age, etc.