Sorry to revive an old thread but I wanted to share my comments. Being a drummer and an engineer I have a slighty different perspective. My viewpoint is as an engineer, just do everything I can to record the drummer no matter how he plays, or what equipment his is using, WITHOUT changing his technique or modifying his physical setup. Why? I get better recordings from musicians that are COMFORTABLE.
I will give you an example. I did the drum engineering on the album "Time Crunch" for the group Niacin with Dennis Chambers and Billy Sheehan. Dennis has a certain attack volume on the drums, and he is very consistant with this level. While doing the setup, I noticed that I wasn't getting the tone out of the drums I was looking for. Now Dennis uses his Pearl Masters Custom kit (at that time) and Evans drum heads. Asking Dennis to hit harder, or softer, was not an option (if you know what I mean?), so what I did was, I called a product rep at Remo and told him to send over a complete set of Remo White Coated Ambassador drum heads, and pleaded with Dennis just to TRY them, until he relented. Now of course, we couldn't tell the Evans guys, and I had to tell the Remo guy that I was trying to convert Dennis to using their product, (which I wasn't, as he had a bad experience with Remo when he was an up and coming drummer, and vowed NEVER to use them). Anyway, we replaced the heads and "VOILA", we were good to go, and IMHO the drums sounded great on that recording.
Mics used: Sennheiser md-421's toms and kick
Shure SM-57 snare, didn't mic the bottom
Neumann U-87's overhead room mics
Shure SM-81's direct overheads
additional Beyer M-88 on the kick
Console: Trident 80-B
Pro Tools rig for tracking
Then transferred the audio to a Studer 24 track 2' tape deck for that analogue smoothness
One note, I pre-EQ'ed the drum mix, ON INPUT, since I was their live sound engineer I knew the sound they were looking for, and didn't want to chance the other engineer altering the sound of the drums. At final mixdown, I have to admit, the drums sounded a bit strange when solo'ed, but within the mix, AMAZING.