all that's absolutely true about practicing and paying your dues, but some of those drummers on the recordings have other things going for them too, like studio tricks. to give you an example, my band went to a studio known for producing amazing recordings. i listened to some of their portfolio and was blown away by how perfect the drummers sounded. no matter who was playing, all double bass and other drumming was perfectly solid and in perfect time. everything sounded perfect. then we recorded there. i did not lay down perfect tracks, i'll tell you that straight up. but they assured me that there was no need to play anything over, they'd "fix everything in the mix". the engineer worked on the mix by himself and two days later we got the result. it sounded amazing, just like all the other stuff they'd done. my drumming sounded absolutely solid and perfect, but i knew it wasn't exactly what i'd played. it turned out that they'd run a protools plug in called "beat detective" on all my drumming. beat detective takes every drum note and moves it to the nearest 16th note boundary (or whatever you set) to force everything into perfect time. they'd also compressed the crap out of all my playing so every single note was at maximum volume, including grace notes, which sounded pretty weird to me. i complained, but i'm a lone protesting voice because everybody LOVES my drumming on that recording. i think i sound like a drum machine, but no one cares. so there you have it. that's another reason why drummers sound so incredible on those professional recordings.