Here's a quick process to use to get great sounding drums in no time.

Start with overheads

Listen to the overall drum sound through the overheads. That's where the essence of the drums come from so they need to sound great. Approach the overhead sound like you would a mastering session. The overheads are a combination of different instruments that you need to mix together.

EQ - Don't use really drastic boosts and cuts while EQ'ing the overheads. You might make one drum sound awesome, but it will more than likely come at the expense of another drum. For instance, if you boost the low-end a lot it will give you a thick kick drum but a boomy snare drum. That's why subtle EQ'ing is key for the overheads.

Compression - I like routing my overheads to a separate stereo bus an compressing them together. It helps to use compression to glue both overheads together. I talk extensively about the benefits of routing and subgroups in the Drum Mix Toolkit.

Add in the Kick and Snare

This is the time to use EQ and compression to really make the kick drum shine.

EQ - Use your spot mics to really use your EQ skills instead of on the overheads.

Here's my mantra when it comes to kick drums:

Cuts the mids, boost the lows and sprinkle with highs.

That's it! Get rid of the boxiness in the middle, increase the thickness in the lows and accent the beater in the high-mids.

The snare is a little different. I usually filter out the lows, cut the boxiness but sometimes boost the mids. And finally I add a little crackle and pop to the highs.

Compression - Depending on your compression preferences you have two choices:

1. Hit them hard - High ratios, fast attacks and lots of gain reduction. Not my favorite but sometimes works.
2. Keep them level and tight - Medium ratios, attack and release in time with the song and moderate gain reduction.

I prefer the second one because I do most of my heavy compression with parallel processing. They both have their places and uses so pick the one ya want!

Finish With the Rest

I approach the toms very similarly to how I work on the kick drum. It's just a matter of sweeping around and finding the right frequency to cut and boost for each individual tom.

From there I add the right reverb and sometimes choose a different one for the snare to make it stand out. My entire drum mixing process, and all the information I've learned about mixing drums in the last decade is inside the Drum Mix Toolkit.

Check it out here:

www.DrumMixToolkit.com