Tune the drums in this room until they sound incredible and THEN and only THEN, put up the mics.

TUNE TUNE TUNE those skins man!!!! a great mic is only as good as its source!!!!!!
here's what i do, i (yes Me, and im no drummer, but have talked with all the great drummers of our world, Alan White, Vinnie, Tony Snow, Steve Smith, Paul Wertico as to how they do it) tune the drums with a guitar tuner that has a small mic on it.
nothing is worse than guitars and bass hitting root notes perfectly and the floor tom is pitched way off!!!! with 2 rack toms and a floor tom i go with the small tom and floor tom an octave apart with the 2nd tom in between, snare possibly in tune with the second tom or a different note all together. im telling you IT WORKS.. also the resonant head (bottom) needs to be pitched higher than the top and the drum should deliver one tone only without the wavering effect like BOOOOOOM not BUUUOOOAAMM get it!!??
once you have accomplished that your mics will be happy, the client will be happy and you'll be happy.

also watch for the phase of the Overheads, between the OH and the Kick/Snare, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE watch the placement of the snare mic to the hihat and the hihat mic to the snare and the rest of the kit. make sure the hihat and the cymbals work for the room and the song. you need to check the transients of the cymbals on the wave draw to see if they get brutal or are nice and airy.
on the drums snare , kick and toms, watch your gain stage input on the pre's.....too much and your going to kill the transients of those drums. after recording a bit of the drums as a whole open the wave draws to the maximum to see if your flat topping the sample, i fyou are backoff of the gain a bit. i did that ONCE when our Neve was installed and it wasnt pretty sounding... the Neve 8108 pre's are F'n LOUD so i end up tracking drums at -26db (once click up from min) and use the small fader to fed the input to the converter. just a thought......good luck and post some dry samples of the tracks when you can!!

planet10, post: 347122 wrote: TUNE TUNE TUNE those skins man!!!! a great mic is only as good as its source!!!!!!
here's what i do, i (yes Me, and im no drummer, but have talked with all the great drummers of our world, Alan White, Vinnie, Tony Snow, Steve Smith, Paul Wertico as to how they do it) tune the drums with a guitar tuner that has a small mic on it.
nothing is worse than guitars and bass hitting root notes perfectly and the floor tom is pitched way off!!!! with 2 rack toms and a floor tom i go with the small tom and floor tom an octave apart with the 2nd tom in between, snare possibly in tune with the second tom or a different note all together. im telling you IT WORKS.. also the resonant head (bottom) needs to be pitched higher than the top and the drum should deliver one tone only without the wavering effect like BOOOOOOM not BUUUOOOAAMM get it!!??
once you have accomplished that your mics will be happy, the client will be happy and you'll be happy.

I havent really spoken to this in my discussions about drum recording, but as is being said, the drums should definately be in some sort of harmonic frquency of the key signature of the song. An album I did years ago, we made sure and tuned the drums to every key for every song. It wound up being the easiest drum mix I've ever had to deal with.

This is something I've been thinking about doing, as it makes perfect sense.
But, getting more amateur drummers to actually agree to do this can be tricky.
Chalk it up to the younger generation's short attention span?
Think I'll force my hand next chance I get!