I sidechain my claps and snares, with a very short releasetime using a short ghostkick, so the ducking is very quick, then I only dial in a hint of ratio, then I compensate the gain. I think this makes my claps and snares sound more even in my tracks and not jumping too much. This is more just my workflow, as I feel I don't get the same results by simply compressing the claps/snares for this specific purpose.
You can also sidechain compress different elements to eachother to make them cooperate better, for instance it's pretty common in rock music to let the vocals cut the level of the guitar by perhaps a dB only. The same thing can be applied to other elements, for instance I have a track where I have massive synth sounds with very long and bright reverb tails, where you have the 1st synth sound, then the 2nd one, then the 3rd one, etc. The problem was though that the reverb tails overlapped and made it muddy, so I simply sidechained them to eachother so the reverb tail of the previous synth sound was pretty much muted and replaced with the new synth sound.
Speaking of kick and bass (mohaha), if you use Patcher in FL Studio you can set it up so you can have multiband sidechain compression, for instance if you have a bright bass synth, and you really need to compress the sub frequency away completely to make a smooth bass line but don't want the actual synth sound to jump away that heavily, this can come in handy. I use this a lot in my tracks.
This isn't sidechaining 101, which is why I included it even though you didn't want any kick and bass answers
More than this I pretty much just sidechain anything/everything that I simply want a sidechained ducking sound on. Even just a little bit can make the song more smooth, even though you don't want any obvious ducking sound (such as a riser synth in the background), you can still dial in a hint of sidechained compression that isn't audible but still balances the sound.
