Ok here's an example of what I'm after, it's the main snare on the second and fourth beats, really soft and lazy but sounds all so good..

what I want

and here's what I've got, remember it's just the attack phase I'm interested in at the mo..

what I've got

I'm basically trying to get the lower regions of my percussion to sound good as I've tended to eq them out up to now, but listening to the likes of speedy j, his percussion goes really low in the mix and sounds really beefy. The resulting drastic eq'ing I'm doing also creates a big hole in the 250-600k area which is no good to get that full sound, so I really need to address the problem and get my drums sounding good lower.