I enjoyed your article on recording sample-ready drums. It reminded me of what I used to go through several years ago. Since then, I've realized that you can just buy triggers that clamp on to the drums. These are the same ones that people use to trigger sound modules from an acoustic kit made by Ddrum and Pintech. You can just mount these on the drums and plug them in to your mic preamps, just like you would a microphone, and record them. Then use Drumagog or Sound Replacer to replace the sound of the triggers with your samples.
The advantage is twofold. You don't need to deaden the drums or tune them in an odd way and there is no bleed from cymbals, snare drums, etc... to cause mis-triggers.
If you use a program like Drumagog for your sample replacement, you can insert a compressor or limiter in front of Drumagog to even out the hits without having to compress the sound of the sample. This is a godsend for death metal where the consistency from the drummer is normally all over the map.
