For the drum sounds, I'm using the smaller cymbal sizes on most, 14" Sonor 1 for snare, and 22" Sonor plastic beater for the kick drum. The rest (toms) only have one Sonor option, so I'm using that, obviously.
I've taken a couple of pictures of my mic placement. As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. The first one just shows the overall placement and distance from the cabinet of both mics:
http://members.shaw.ca/mrduplicity/general.jpg
As you can see, both mics are fairly close up to the cab. From the grill cloth to the mic, I would say it's within 1". To the actual speaker, perhaps around 3-4". The mic on the left is an Apex 460 condenser mic. It's a great mic, it has a 12AX7 in it and it comes with an external power supply/pickup pattern selector. You can choose the three basic pickup patterns (cardioid, omni-directional, and bi-polar), and then three gradient patterns in between each, for a total of nine options. It's a great mic. In this recording I set the mic to bi-polar for two reasons. One, to reverse the phase of the mic so that it matched the other mic (my mixing board sucks and has no phase buttons on it) and two so that some "room sound" was incorporated. Had I the option to only reverse the phase and not take in the room sound, I probably would have. But correct phase is more important than a bit of room sound! The mic is positioned about 0.5" from the centre of the cone and aimed off-axis so that the pickup points more toward the edge of the speaker, rather than directly into the centre of it. I came up with this position by playing my guitar and slowly panning the mic-stand around until it sounded good to me. Then from there I just spun the mic about 30 degrees off axis so it was not aimed directly into the high-frequency beam.
The mic on the right is a great dynamic mic, pretty well known for recording guitars. It's a Sennheiser e609. I like it because it has a very nice pickup response for distorted guitars, and it can take a ******' beating in terms of volumes. With condensers you have to be careful not to ruin the pickup screen with loud SPLs, but dynamics are basically indestructible. I've used this mic (in addition to my Shure SM57) to record both my MKIV and RKII on maximum volume before and they performed admirably. The e609 is positioned more or less dead centre in the speaker, and again, aimed off-axis to the edge of the speaker.
Here's another picture from above, it shows the positioning and the aiming of the mics a bit better.
http://members.shaw.ca/mrduplicity/overhead.jpg
At the board, I panned one mic all the way left and one all the way right, then matched their gains so that there was a more-or-less even signal coming to both sides. The dynamic always requires more gain, since the condenser is both more sensitive and it also has its own power supply.
Then from there, I did three takes for the rhythm tracks. One was panned hard left, one hard right, one centre. Since I recorded in stereo, panning the two tracks left and right means that the stereo signal gets squashed into a mono signal if it's panned 100% to one side. Considering this, it's imperative that the phase relationship between the two mics is bang on. A good way to make sure they are acceptable is to do some test recording in a smaller wave-editor (like Goldwave). Record a short sound (I like to do a quick, loud note) then zoom right in to the beginning of the sound wave, and compare the left and right channels. The two channels should both start within 1ms of each other, and they should both be in phase, meaning that, if the left channel starts its waveform by trending upward, the right channel should do the same thing.
Take a look at this picture to see what I mean:
http://members.shaw.ca/mrduplicity/wave.JPG
Follow the two waves, they both start by jutting upward, both at the same time. This is essential so that when you pan the signals both to one side in your overall mix, the resultant mono signal is not riddled with phase-distortions. They can make your tone sound tinny, hollow, distant, thin, whatever... they generally aren't good.
Anyway... I think I've written a novel. Hope it helps.
