Quote:
Originally Posted by Ethan Winer 
I'm with Glenn. Small-room ambience is almost always bad ambience. Much better IMO to record in a dead room and add ambience later with a good reverb. --Ethan
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Absolutely!
One very important thing to consider... close reflections / standing waves can make drum tuning nearly impossible. You'll get all kinds of weird harmonic ringing in the heads that will be impossible to get rid of without over-muffling the heads. So regardless of the sound of the small room itself, you'll likely never get the drums sounding good on their own in a small live room anyway.
And... oh yeah, a small live room will make for tons of extra bleed into all drum mics... reduces effective isolation per track. And it won't be "good bleed" that you hear some folks talk about, it'll be "bad bleed", the type that will make a good drum mix nearly impossible.
Add good broadband bass traps to the room, plenty of them, this way you can achieve a really good, rich, tight drum sound with minimal bleed... then add your "room sound" with a top-notch outboard reverb later. Or you can even play back the recorded dry drums into an actual nice room and record that.
