it depends on your sounds.

usually you have one mono track for kick and one for snare (except if you have a nice stereo snare sample). then you should route your cymbals together to a stereo output inside battery. the same with the toms.
pan your cymbals and toms in battery where you want them to be.
this way you can work all the cymbals as one track, like the overhead-mic track.
now you should have 4 tracks for your drums (5 if you have an extra mono track for your hihat, which doesn't make much sense with samples)
kick (mono), snare (mono) toms (stereo) and cymbals (stereo)
put your eq's or/and compressors on the tracks as inserts, reverb as sends.
then route all tracks (including the send fx-buses) to a stereo bus.
there you can eq/compress/reverbarate the whole drumset if you like.

don't know if it's the common way, but it works really good for me.

hope this helps.

oh, I should read more carefully.

what I said was meant for realistic drum programming.
in electronic music you can do pretty much what you want.
when you have stereo samples use stereo tracks, if they're in mono then use mono outputs.
if you use different sounds on one output, use stereo.
it only depends on what you want to do.

but what I said in my previous post can also be applied with electronic sounds.

cheers for you input mate

that really really helps and makes sense

gonna get straight to it now and try the different ways out

thaks again
dude