I miced a drum kit using a pair of Samson C02 overheads, an SM57 on the snare and an AKG D112 on the kick. The Overheads were ran through a pair of PreSonus tubepres, and the Kick went into an art tube mp preamp. These were then fed into a Fostex VF160EX recorder.

The overall sound was very good. It sounded real, almost live, and went direct with no EQ sounding pretty decent.

My question is that when I was Micing the drums, I had to set the levels on the preamps low to avoid distortion, but then when mixing in other intruments, I had to peg the drum levels to even be heard at all...I tried boosting the signal faders for my drum channels to +6, and kept everything else at -30 or lower.

Is this normal? Should I use a compressor to bring those peak levels down and then use the gain-makeup to boost the signals?

Thanks in advance for your replies.