I wasn't sure if I should post this in equiptment or technique, but I figured technique was about right.

I bought some Vic Firth Isolation Headphones upon the recomendation of everyone here on the boards. They work great and I'm happy with them. My ears thank you as well.

The problem is that my snare has kind of an annoying sound to it when I'm using them. Evrything else on the kit sounds fine (although dampened) but I can hear the cymbals, BD, and toms over the music without the tone changing much.

The snare however, is transformed into a kind of an irritating, hollow, dull thud. No snares, no snap. It's almost like my ears can feel the snare, rather than hear it.

So I decided to try and mic the set and feed it through the headphones to try and get a clearer sound. Now I'm no sound enginer, mind you, so i'm experimenting a little bit with 4 area mics, but it seems the only sound I can get from my snare, sounds loose, hollow, way too open.

I've heard there are some "tricks of the trade" for micing a snare drum but I don't know any of them. I'm open to experimentation and toying around until I get a decent sound, but I'm not sure where to start really.

Overall I like the way my snare sounds without the headphones. I don't really want to retune it because I know that naturally it sounds fine. But how do I solve this problem with the iso phones? Or is this something I'm just going to have to learn to live with?

I was able to get a little better tone out of my mics by adjusting some of the volumes in my setup.

I currently have 4 mics:
1 on the kick,
1 beside the floor tom, (which picks up my FT, Ride, and 2ndary hats).
1 overhead for 3 crashes, (which also picks up my two mounted toms pretty well)
and
1 between my main hats and snare.

The mics run into a mixer and then to a 4-track. My music is also sent to the 4-track on another channel where I mix them together and send to my headphones.

I wanted to mix it all on the board and then send it through the headphones but the board by itself doesn't have enough power, so I opted for the 4-track. I'm finding that this works better because I can record the music, and my playing on seperate tracks and then filter out the music to see how bad I really sound 

Anyway, to answer your question, I currently have the mic positioned towards the side of the snare, about mid-height up. (this does a decent job of picking up my hats as well. ) I tried both top and bottom rims and got the extremeties of each side, but it was still hollow and overall nothing that really captured me, soundwise.

I'm looking into conjuring up a few of the crappy mics I have lying around my basement just for better coverage, maybe I'll be able to get more than one mic on my snare drum.