in my opinion, what's way more important than your mic selection when it comes to your drum sound : the quality of the kit, the tuning of the kit, and the technique of the drummer. if all those things are in line, you can get a sound with your 57's and 58's that won't *totally* suck ass. you can spend a grand on a battery of drum mics, and if your kit sucks, you don't tune it right, and your drummer doesn't know how to hit properly, you're drum sound may *totally* suck ass. food for thought.
another "just an opinion", but i'd say that the most important thing to getting an awesome drum sound, assuming all the drum/drummer-related stuff is in line, is gonna be your room acoustics, and your selection of/ placement of your room mics. many might disagree with me on this, but i'd say the room mics are the place to concentrate your money initially. i think you could use a single 57 on the *kick and snare*, and a single 57 on the toms, assuming a 4-piece kit, and if you throw up some well-placed, good-quality room mics, you can get a sound that sounds reasonably much like your kit. then, over the course of time, pick up the kick mic and the snare mic. keep using the 57's on the toms until you've spent your money on the other components, and then get into some nice tom mics. that's where i am right now. i have KSM137's for overheads, a beta52 or beyer M88 for kick, the revox M3500 for snare, on the way this week (there's another one on ebay right now, from the same guy i bought mine from, for $150 buy it now, and that one's got the XLR connector instead of the Tuchel. hrm...) and i'm still using SM57's for toms. that's next, for me. i've been happy with the route i've gone, mic-wise. i can still listen to the recordings i did with only two SM57's, or a couple 57's and a 58, or a couple 57's, a 58, and a BG2.0, etc. i still like them fine. but until you get some good room mics, you're not gonna have a cymbal sound worth a damn, and your kit sound is gonna be pretty small and relatively space-less.
that's my 2 cents then. i'd recommend picking up that beyer M3500 before somebody else does, but i really can't, seeing as i haven't got mine yet so i really don't know what i think of it. but if it really is mostly a beyer 201, then the $150 price tag makes me wanna buy that one, too. that's really fucking cheap for a good mic. i just can't say for sure that it's a good mic. yet.
also, look for threads on this site about compressors. you're going to need at least *one* channel of compression, at an absolute minimum, if you plan on tracking vocals. i wanna say the Red Stripe compressor and the RNC are the ones that seem to get some praise, and the Distressor gets dissed (har har) as not being all it's cracked up to be, for the price. but you're gonna need more than just mics.
as far as digital versus analog... no comment. i dig both just fine.
also, this might knock the doors off your tascam porta XYZ or whatever you have now. and it's looking like it'll go for less than you'd pay for a MD421... although it doesn't mention how you pay, or what shipping methods are available, so who knows.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 12339&rd=1