guidothepimmp Cool cool - a lot of what I read online is professionals saying that buying new shit isn't gonna necessarily achieve what you want right away and often recommend learning stock plugins before looking into spending a fortune on paid ones.
So, to help you on the way, for me (and for many others based on my research), the key elements of a drum mix are:
- Having a good selection of tracks (you want the shells and HH/Ride in the form of close mics, overheads for the rest of the cymbals and for a snapshot of the shells too, room mics which will give you a lot of power)
- EQ (you want separate tracks for the drum mics - don't work in a situation where drums are summed down to one stereo track) - here, you're wanting to remove some frequencies (e.g. somewhere 200-500Hz depending where your kick sounds like a cardboard box - boxy) or accentuate others (e.g. in a metal mix you would boost high end on a kick for the 'clicky' kick sound)
- Compression across the mics/drums - be careful not to overdo it but also not underdo it - a lot of power and movement on drum tracks comes from compression
- Light compression on a Drum Bus to 'glue' the drums together and make them into one coherent instrument
- Send all mics to a parallel compression bus that you will compress the crap out of the drums on (so you'll have the drums processed as above with additional sends to this bus so you can do this processing without ruining your drum mix thus far) - then, just use the volume on the parallel bus to ease in just enough that you have a powerful sounding set of drums (too much gives you an over compressed mess)
- Parallel Reverb bus - same concept as parallel compression but you're applying reverb here - this bus can also have a send to the parallel compression bus if you want
- Finally, as guitarists, our tendency is to create mixes that very clearly are mixed by guitarists where the guitars are the absolute main instrument and you can hear not enough went into making the drums powerful in a full mix. Try avoid this too ?
At the very least, I've given you some pointers on what topics to research further regarding mixing drums
