I wanted to practice with sidechain compression and learn to actually make some decent sounding production. It has clips from number station recordings, and a couple tracks from some Korg volcas. It was a ton of fun to make actually- a nice contrast to the usual endless frustration that is my usual recording experience.
Are you sidechaining the other tracks to the kick (well, minus the snare, of course)? You could raise the levels or compress the non-drum-sample tracks quite a bit, and then sidechain them even more. That's my style, at least.
Hit all the buttons, turn all the knobs, and push all the sliders in combinations until you find a sound you like. I'm only maybe 22% kidding.
So I guess iterate through about 78% of the buttons, knobs, and sliders, then. OK, that was near 87% kidding.
100% for real: listen to your productions for a long time (along with the things you usually enjoy) and figure out how you'd like to progress, and repeat the process. You'll certainly develop a unique sound that way.
I've got a technical question about the sidechaining then. I'm using Reaper, and when I use the kick as the auxiliary input for another track's compressor, Reaper will register clipping in the auxiliary levels if I turn that track up. So my question is... does it matter? I've realized I can get rid of the clipping flag by turning down the auxiliary input gain then bumping up the compression ratio to maintain the same amount of compression as previously, but it's a bit of a PITA. Either way it's clipping on a sound that isn't heard, so what's the downside of leaving it to clip as it pleases?
The only thing that really matters is how it sounds in the mix. That said, if inputs to sidechain compression (or other sidechaining effects) are clipping, they tend to have more variance in response behavior to other small volume changes in both the track being sidechained, and the track you're sidechaining to. If that makes sense.