1) Captain obvious point: make sure you've got the best possible kit for the job during recording time. A good drumset shouldn't need any tape or dampening...just a nice clear open tone. The idea is to get the drums louder than the cymbals. Brass/metal snares tend to have a good crack very favorable to rock music.
Tape is what you do when you're either too lazy to tune drums the right way, too broke to buy new skins/drums or want to re-live the 70s without the acid trip. Let the drums breathe man.
2) Captain obvious point: make sure your drummer dosn't suck. If he does, replace him with someone who doesn't suck. Don't waste time and don't be shy about it. You're an engineer, not a goddamn drum teacher. A good drummer is in the pocket, hits with great feeling and is consistent.
3) Captain obvious point: pick a good room. Preferably one that dosn't suck out loud. Big rooms tend to work best. Use your ears.
4) Cymbals are important too. Not too washy, tonally balanced with the kit, good attack and decay variables and sound proportional to the kit. You can get surgical and pick out cymbals to match the key of the song, but at that point you gotta ask yourself, "really?" Damn nut jobs. Use your ears.
5) Get your mics in order. Do whatever it is you do. Do all that phase checking shit and just get those drums sounding good. Slap up a hall mic down the hallway and compress the shit out of it. Really brings the kit together.
6) Once you're in session, get your drummer to sample the kit before every new song with all mics record armed (including room mics). You can do this off in an empty space in the session. You want a few good solid kick, snare, tom and cymbal hits with that.
7) In a seperate session, build up your samples with the room mics built into it. You're looking at something kind of over the top here on purpose. It might sound like each drum has excessive verb in the sample, but it will make sense when you mix it into the dry drum track. Consolidate each processed sample, bounce them down to one mono track and make sure they start right at the transient of the drum to avoid excessive phasing issues.
8) Duplicate each drum track and rename them as sample tracks. That can be kick sample, snare sample, tom hi sample, etc etc. You're going to need some type of sound replacer program. If not, bust out the coffee cause we're gonna be here all fucking night doing this manually.
9) replace each live drum track duplicate with their sampled versions. At the end you should have two tracks of each drum. One dry and one sample replaced version.
10) There's a good chance you're going to have some phasing issues because of mis-alignment between the dry and sampled tracks. You're going to have to listen to each hit and manually realign the ones that are out of sync. It takes for fucking ever. This will be painful, I promise.
11) Once the tracks are all clean and aligned, you can start screwing with the sample tracks. You can try different types of verb and compression. The idea is to build a "tail" behind the dry track. A drums perceived power comes from the relationship between its attack and it's tail. So this is where you want to spend most of your time when mixing drums. Make sure the sample enhances the drum naturally (or unnaturally if you want that fake sound). You can get the samples pretty wet for good effect.
If done right, you should be hearing a drum that really has some POW all the way through the track naturally. You can still compress and eq the dry track however you want as long as you get the samples to work together. They should end up sounding strong during the heaviest and lightest parts of the song. You can sum each dry track and its sample track to a single track and compress that to "glue" them together.
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