Well, my "cheat sheet" is to record killer drums in a great live room with a great drummer and good mics. 15' skylight ceilings, vintage gretsch or ludwig kit, legit cymbals, neumann mics, money preamps, and oh yeah, a great drummer, who knows how to get a clean, high-impact bounce off the sweet spot of the drum or cymbal.

So there's that, which is what I recommend.

But if you want to do it all with samples, or with a drum machine, in a bedroom studio, then the first thing you need to come to grips with is the fact that your playback system is completely inadequate for mimicking real drums.

Unless your monitors are dual-woofer Barefoots or ATM or some such, then you tapping a keyboard and triggering a sample, is never going to deliver the same kind of impact and physicality as a real kick/snare pattern, in the room with the drummer.

For the recording, who cares? People are gonna hear it how they hear it, through what they hear it through, right?

But for the performance, it matters. A maxed-out snare is fucking LOUD. And a maxed-out crash cymbal is like, literally, capable of causing instantaneous hearing damage.

There are some awful drummers who insist on wearing cheap and heavy hearing protection, and who then proceed to play as though they don't have hearing protection, and who MASSIVELY over-hit the cymbals and snare and other stuff that is muffled by their hearing-protection, to try and make up for how muffled it sounds. They can be extremely difficult to record, even if they are technically proficient, and they often take a lot of mics and a lot of sample-replacement.