Preparing to record
When setting up a recording session, the first thing you need to sort out is the room in which the drums are going to be recorded. The question is: live or dead? If you're making a rock track, you'll need a ‘live'-sounding room or an adjacent live-sounding room where you can put ambient mics. If there's a rug on a wooden floor, get rid of it – drums always sound better on a hard surface. For a dry, disco-sounding kit, you'll need a ‘dead' room, like the lounge or bedroom, where soft furnishings help to calm the sound.
The drum kit
A good drummer will know how important it is to get the kit sounding right. Freshly tuned, new heads will have a crisp attack and make the drums nice and loud. Loud drums make the room sound better and don't get drowned out by cymbal wash. A common mistake people make is over-damping the drums in pursuit of a dry, 70s type of sound. Bear in mind that lots of top-end resonance and room ambience gets absorbed in the mix by guitars – especially in rock music. Over-damping also makes the drums quiet, so easy does it! Keep a selection of blankets, pillows and bricks around to help get the kick drum right. Try and keep some life in the sound; don't muffle it so much that it sounds like a cardboard box. Use the dampening to just shorten the sound. The best thing for dampening the top head of the snare is Moon Gel by RTOM. It costs about £8 and makes finetuning snare sounds easy.
The session
Before you hit the record button, you need to prepare your session. Working with a sprawling production featuring 20 tracks of backing vocals and tons of plugins is going to mean complications down the line. By printing or bouncing down the key elements of your track as new audio files, you can unload all plugins from the session. This will prevent latency problems, so that the drummer will hear everything right in his headphones and there won't be any complicated latency compensation processes happening in the background.
You should aim to end up with a few bounced ‘stems' – guide drums, bass, guitars, keys, vocals. Make sure they all start on bar 3 or later, so that you have at least a couple of bars of count-in. The click or guide drum loop can be MIDItriggered or printed as audio. These few tracks then need to be turned down to around -15dB – this will leave plenty of headroom for the click to be clearly heard by the drummer over the backing track and the drums.