I'm currently feeling my way round recording live drums for a CD
project, and am trying to get the best sound possible, having only had
a few amateur drum recording experiences over the years.

I got some reasonable results on a test run a while back mixing a
stereo track from two overhead condensers (one roughly above the snare
and the other over the floor tom) and a dynamic on the kick panned in
the middle.

For my next attempt I should hopefully have the luxury of recording
four individual tracks of drums. I was going to use the same set up,
feeding the kick to its own track this time and use the fourth track
for snare. What I've been musing over though is putting a padded
condenser on the bottom of the snare rather than a dynamic 45 degrees
on the top. My reasoning (for what it's worth) is that my overheads
should capture a lot of the top skin anyway and I would like to get
more of the actual snare to mix in to the sound. My drummer likes his
flams and I've read that bottom micing captures the subleties better.

I've miced the top snare separately before and found that it didn't
really contribute much, I wound up eqing and compressing it to bring
out more snare crack anyway. This might well have been due to the
sortcomings of my mic/mic technique, however. I was wondering if
anyone had tried a similar set up and if there were any shortfalls
they could advise me of.

Thanks in advance for any benefit of prior experience you could give
me!