I record drums similarily to you using RM's method with SDC's. You get a great attack sound from the SDC's which get "wishy washy" compressed. The SDC's uncompressed get a really tight dryish sound. But what I do is crush the FOK and blend in to taste. It gives you that bigger room/drum sound - you know, fills in the cracks. But if you compare the FOK to the OH's you'll notice that you lose that tight attack on the toms etc on the FOK. That's why it sounds bigger when you blend to the two. But if your already compressing the OH's your compromising the punch needlessly, since you have another track to serve the function that compression can add to the mix.

Compression ALWAYS sounds great on drums.
It stops your ears doing too much work.

Have you tried just compressing Kick and Snare ?
Tight Gate first , then compress.
Introduce it into a drum mix.

Awesome. Is there any thought to having an ultra-compression version of the lightly compressed track and blending them in the mix?

Some folks prefer this to general compression and it seems to sound different.

Coincidentally, I was just playing with this method last night after reading it in Recording magazine.

The pleasing effect may be that you get to keep the attack of the tracked version while adding the long decay of the super-compressed stuff to fill the gaps. You wouldn't want to track with that much compression because you would lose all your attack and there would be wierd decays going on if you were compressing each mic separately.

Also, compressing the kit as a whole sounds more natural to me than compressing each mic individually. The smoothly compressed drum mix makes the dynamics very even.

Really I don't know though, just guessing.

something like that. it works for guitars too, and i imagine vocals.

This technique has been around for a while. Apparently it was a style that originated out of NYC that a lot of people were using.

It was way cool sounding the first time I used it.

I've always gotten a kick out of the old motown trick of mult'ing, where you filter the mids and highs out on one bus and excite and compress just the lows. Then filter the lows and the highs out and excite and compress just the mids in a different bus. Then filter the lows and mids and excite and compress just the highs in another bus. Then mix with your dry tracks and bring in the filtered (multed) compressed bands until you have the most amazing drums you've ever heard. A little time consuming to setup but certainly worth the trouble in the end.

And yes, it absolutely works wonders with acoustic guitars, especially if you add reverb into your aux channels.

comp on drums

this is a great way to salvage a sub par drum track...thanks!!!!

I was reading a technique that Michael Brauer uses and he creates 4 compression buses and uses them mixed against the uncompressed or compressed while tracking tracks. Give it a read , very interesting stuff;

http://www.mbrauer.com/articles/tapeop.asp?pp=1