In Studio Five, we don't have a big live room for tracking bands, just a nice big booth. One of the 4A had a reputation as a drum room, and several of the producers were using 20 or more mics on a drum kit. More than one on each drum, plus stereo overheads and three room mics (carefully measured with a cloth tape. I expected phase issues, but the kits sound fantastic, and of course you can phase align the tracks after recording either with a plugin or just sliding them. I've mixed some stuff where the drums were mic'd this way, and you're somewhat restricted because you have a lot of tracks with several drums on them. Levels and eq on the cymbals, for example, affect other drums to a considerable degree. My preference has always been one close mic per drum, except for kick and snare (both of which need two), and one pretty close mic (a KM-184 or 185, for example) for each cymbal. Maybe because only one of my earlier tracking rooms was as good as 4a, I didn't get in the habit of using room mics much. I like to have more control over each drum and cymbal in the mix with close mic'ing, and more control over ambiance with reverbs and echoes than with a bunch of room mics.
