Wow-A lot of factors at play here. Yet I'm in a very similar position.
The Room is crap, the Drummer is inexperienced, The Kit is absolute garbage. And I'm not all that experienced at micing drums. It's never going to sound particularly
good let alone
great. Most of the engineering is going to be about damage control or minimizing the impact of the room during tracking.
The gear.
Digi 001 (The rehearsal room/bar gig rig)
Presonus D8 (Line Inputs 1-8)
ADA 8000 (ADAT 1-8)
The Mics
Kick=Shure Beta SM52
Snare Top= SM57
Snare Bottom=SM57
Hi Tom=SM57
Low Tom=SM57
Floor Tom=AT3035
Hi Hat= AT3031
Overhead Left=MXL 2001
Overhead Right=MXL 2001
After getting the mic's set up in what seems to be good positions to A) Maximize impact and tone B) Minimize drum to drum bleed and phase problems I'm left with the fact that the room is terrible and the kit sounds like trash..... My next most sonicly productive areas are to A) Change the room as much as I can B) Tune the kit. I'm confident that with a little work I can track the drums and get a passable drum tracks. Miking each drum and cymbals will make any drum reinforcement/replacing that much easier later on.
In my case a quality preamp and some higher end mic's probably wouldn't make much of a difference.
I'm running the drums through the ADA8000 and saving the D8 for Vocals and guitars. If I had a better two channel pre in this case I would use it for the vocals or acoustic guitar and not the overheads.
I'm a guitar player and I didn't want to spend a fortune on drum mic's so the centerpiece of the caper is the Shure DMK57-52 drum mike kit. My figuring being the SM52 is good for micing a kick both live and in the studio. The 3 SM57's will always get used even if you replace them down the road with other drum mic's. The Shure kit comes with three very nice drum mount clamps and I ordered 3 more of eBay. A well known forum buddy suggested that SM57s would be terrible for overheads and the floor toms-and not surprisingly he was correct. The Floor Tom got a AT3035 and gained a lot of impact and detail. The AT3031 on the Hi-Hat sounds pretty darn nice too. The MXL's 2001 sound okay given the room they are in.....I May try the AT3035s on the overheads just to see how they sound.
All in all I'm happy with the mic selection. They seem accurate and well balanced. With the exception of the DMK57-52 kit none of these mic's are over 150.00. Non of them sounds terrible and if one got damaged its not real big deal like it would be with something expensive.
1 DMK57-52 drum mic kit = 349.00 (3 SM57's , 1 Beta 52, 3 drum mounts+carrying case)
3 extra Shure drum mounts = 75.00
2 AT3035 = 139.00 ea with 2 free pairs of AT20 headphones
1 AT3031 = 149.00 ea
2 MXL 2001 = 69.00 ea
I'm not bragging about my cheap mic collection-just letting you know what you can spend on a entry level drum mic setup. There are lots of drum mike kits from Shure, Audix, Samson etc at different price points.
If your going to multi mic the drums you going to need a ADAT Preamp and I do like the Presonus D8. You can find B Stock on eBay at around 349.00. I'm probably going to replace the ADA 8000 with another D8 very shortly. The ADA8000 has actually been okay but the 8 XLRs on the front are making the front of the rack a jungle of cables. Lets just say the room and the kit are holding things back more than the ADA8000 is.
Grab a D8-If your tracking bands you will eventually need the inputs.
SM57s are not good for overheads although they are great on Snares and Toms. If your kit doesn't come with clamps you will need a LOT of Boom stands and its likely to get messy.
If your not going to do do drum replacing a simpler drum micing technique may work better for you on some demo sessions.
I have no idea if this helps or if its TMI
but I don't see a nice mic pre and some higher end mic's helping you short term.
Getting out there and working outside of your normal environment is going to help your skills a lot.