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You can do a lot of creative things with the sidechain, or pretty basic ones like getting a cleaner sound by ducking the bassline with the bassdrum. You may also use an otherwise inaudible signal for sidechaining, that way you can control the pumping effect independent of the bassdrum. Sidechain the bassdrum into a melody loop or a pad-like instrument's compressor, et voila. Know that pumping effect in house music (popular in "Call on me" by Eric Prydz)? That is usually achieved by sidechaining. If your compressor supports sidechaining, you can use one source audio signal to compress another. A suitable release setting helps with reducing unwanted pumping effects: the compression effect slowly fades away during the release time, after the audio signal is gone. So the percussive drive of the sound is preserved. When the compressor detects a sharp attack, it will set in only after the attack time, and the first milliseconds of the drum won't be compressed. With drum sounds for example, it's often good to delay the attack of the compression. Here you can slow down the reaction times of the compressor. This explains the term: the wave material is being limited to the peak volume defined by the threshold value. A limiter is a compressor with a ratio set to a very high setting (like 1:16, or in some cases 1:infinite). The higher the ratio, the more a compressor is becoming a limiter. A ratio of 2:1 for example would reduce the waves between threshold and peak to 50% (in graphical display: to half height).
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Means the relative amount of compression. Special multiband compressors for exactly that task are called de-esser by the way. That means: if you compress voice for example, and there's a loud sibilant exceeding the threshold level, it will be compressed. The Threshold setting defines the volume level, from which above peaks will be affected by compression. The following settings should be basically found on every compressor device: