If you're flying a larger passenger plane into basically any major airport, ILS should get you most of the way down - you just need to control speed (you're looking for landing speed +10 by the end)

Depending where you're flying, some arrivals have gaps which threw me off massively when I first started - it's because IRL there's ATC there to guide you to the final intersection for the runway, usually 10NM out... so aim for that and capture ILS, it's quite a wide margin for capture.

If you're going manually, 10nm out you want to start descending at around 600-700fpm from ~3000ft and you should have visual on the runway at this point

I never thought of mixing that with local radio. That sounds wonderful.