Well, if you really want to get fussy about it, you need to have a good way of triggering the gates, and mics just don't do it. I have a friend who used to work for NIN, and when he first started with them, he made a system where there was a laser beam going over the head, so just before the stick hit the head, it broke the beam, and would trigger the gate. Of course, it was NIN, so it lasted all of about half a show before Trent Reznor poured a shitload of some liquid in to the control box.
Steve Albini does something similar, though his laser is bouncing off of a little piece of Mylar or some such on the bottom of the head, and the laser is inside the drum.
I don't have that kind of a budget, so I went to Rat Shack and bought some little Piezo Doorbell Buzzers, and I took out the piezo elements. I soldered on some enclosed 1/4 inch jacks, and then I use those to trigger the gates. Because the sound has to travel from the head to the mic through the air, but doesn't have to travel to the trigger through the air, the trigger is set off just a micro-second before the mic picks up the sound pressure. If is then very easy to set the gates to trigger when the drum is hit.
Obviously, this means that you need to track with gates, which a lot of people don't like, fearing that the gates might not trigger properly. But with the triggers, it works so consistently, it just is not an issue. Or at least, I have never had a problem.
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