how many of you send already squashed-to-death room mics to the drum bus comp. ?

[sage691]

i'm talking about a mix on the loud and hardcore side, where the drums need to compete with loud distorted guitars and still cut through the mix. we tracked a session to 2" at a good studio with a good room, and they used 2 vintage u87s as room mics. the room mics were fed to an 1176 and a spectrasonics 610 (i believe?), and squashed pretty severely. it's amazing the difference that those 2 squashed room mic tracks make in the overall mix when everything is going at once. if you mute them, it's like the entire song falls apart and sounds way on the sterile side.

anyway, i'm using a pair of distressors on the parallel drum bus (they RAWK hard!). right now i'm only sending the toms, overheads, and hi hat to the parallel drum bus. snare is going to an 1176, and the SSlate kick sample is ballsy enough without any comp.

i'm just wondering how many of you here with way more mixing chops than me would bother sending the squashed mics to the parallel drum bus ? doesn't seem like it really adds much more, and it might actually take something away.

also, would it benefit any (or hurt) to send the kick and snare(which is already going to the 1176) to the parallel bus ? or in other words, it is generally a good idea (for this style of music) to send ALL of the drum tracks to the stereo drum bus comp., even if some of them are also going to other bus comps. for separate processing ?

i know some of you slutz are going to say "just do it and see if it works" (which i will), but i'm just asking to see if there are some general approaches that work good for mixing drums to this style of music.

oh yeah, i'm mixing on a series 80 trident using mostly all analog outboard.