[Gregg Sartiano]

"I can teach somebody how to get a great snare sound. I can't teach somebody what a great snare sound IS." -- Dave Pensado

Sample addition & mixing is a artform just as picking/tuning/maintaining a SD within a drumkit is. There is no formula.

With that in mind, I hardly ever pre-plan to use a bunch of FX with a sample. I'm more apt to pick samples which are already doing what I intend them to do.

Then these can be sent straight to master or through a SD bus (which includes samples & SD mics) heading to the drum bus. This is where delay compensation comes in very handy.

I'll usually trigger SD reverb from the most neutral sample in a given session, not from SD top or SD sub. That's just me, and it's not a 100% rule.

WATCH PHASE everywhere -- you're reversing SD bottom already, right? Zoom way in to line those samples up -- if they're hitting opposite (phase) from SD top, you may have to invert the samples. Try making 4 or 5 line up & phase match (just at & near the beginning of the sample is fine) and group 'em -- line them up with SD top and then blend in the mix, but don't be committed to using any or all -- add to eliminate deficiencies or push cymbals back (samples have no cymbal bleed). A bonus is that you can use more aggressive parallel compression on a SD sub or drum sub when samples are involved, because the cymbal bleed (HH!) won't "squash" up with the compression floor.

Also, if you're using delay compensation in PT, you can send the samples to SD sub--> Drum sub and also dry to master by control-clicking the output and adding an A 1-2 output to the bus out already there (it'll look like +Bus 1-2 after you add). Nothing will make a squashed SD poke through aggressive master compression faster.