Many of Amon Tobin’s extended drum solos are entirely sampled from breaks and are not programed in MIDI. He uses heavy compression from hardware compressors. Listen to some of Buddy’s Rich’s drum solos and you’ll recognize some of his breaks. Check out http://www.whosampled.com/Amon-Tobin/ to see how he flip’s the original samples.
He uses this exact drum break in one of his songs.
Buddy Rich’s Mercy Mercy Mercy
More so than being a drum programmer, Amon Tobin is is unusually excellent in selecting good sources from which to sample (He admits to not being a musician and not knowing any music theory). For example his song Slowly takes its main melody from the intro of this reggae song.
Listen to all the great jazz drummer (Rich, Krupa, Jones, Art, Roach) and take snippets from their drum solos and use Octatrack beat matching or pre-timestretch them to use in the crossfader breakbeat trick. It’s extremely difficult (IMO impossible) if your not a drummer to replicate the subtle snare rolls, hi-hat accents, asymmetric time signatures etc. in pure MIDI programming and having it sound as natural and organic as a sample of a professional jazz drummer.