I tend to work quickly and using the generic in style drum track is my preferred way to go. Often, it's a compromise. Work quickly and get good results but live with the things I don't really like about the track.

Out of curiosity more than anything else but also really not satisfied with the in style drum track.... I opted to check out the drum style that would work but also had the stems.

I picked a Nashville style with 10 stems and generated them and imported them into my DAW.

Immediately, I realized that they were in fact recorded with a mic and there was a significant amount of bleed from the rest of the kit.

Not to be deterred, I loaded the CLA drum plug and adjusted the gate. I had a reasonable isolation of the main drum. This had to be duplicated across all of the tracks.

I also realized that I couldn't get exactly what I wanted from the stems. Quite simply, what I wanted simply wasn't there. It was necessary to add a couple of instances of my Cakewalk drum synth and play the parts in with my midi keyboard. A bit of quantizing and the hits were on the beats. Doing this especially for the cymbals allowed me to delete the overheads and room where the cymbals were in the stems. This did a major cleanup on the sound and allowed better control over the cymbals high end. The song was so much clearer as a result. Huge.

In the end I have a really good, realistic sounding kit with a quarter note cymbal bell ride in the places I want along with a solid sounding kit that has nice fills. I might have to do this for everything from this point forward.

If you are not working with drum stems you really should give them a try. I think you'll have much better sounding drums.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.