As a Bard your DPS contribution is a secondary objective. Your primary objective is to make the group kill more efficiently. Whatever DPS you can add is helpful, but not if it reduces the overall DPS and downtime of the group.
I agree that you do more individual DPS most of the time by twisting 3x chants with a Drum than if you Melee. But most likely you will be doing something else...either Pulling, CCing, Slowing or Hasteing, or helping with healer mana by playing HP/Mana regen and Runes to mitigate damage on the tank.
So it really depends on the group and how you guys are doing, but my rule of thumb is:
(1) If pulling outdoors: keep a drum equipped
(2) If pulling indoors: keep a Lute equipped
(3) If CCing multiple mobs, keep a Lute equipped to play Runes and HP/Mana regen between Mez/Charm refreshes
(4) If slowing/hasteing, I most likely keep melee weapons up. Sometimes if tank aggro is bad and I'm pulling aggro from slow song, I'll pull out a Lute and just keep distance.
(5) If your group has a dedicated CC (enchanter or bard), a haste (Shaman, Bard or Enchanter), a Slower (shaman, bard or enchanter) and a puller (whatever), and the healer is fine on mana...then I would probably melee and twist chants and a ds. But that sort of scenario rarely comes about.
On occasion, as a bard, you find that there's not a really essential song in your twist at a given moment. The problem there is, do you really have room on your spellbar to keep up enough chants to make chant-dps worthwhile? Even if I'm just doing DPS, I ALWAYS keep up Mez, Charm and Snare in case things go badly, I always keep up hp/mana regen, and if I'm outdoors I ALWAYS keep up Selos. That only leaves 3 'swap slots', and normally I have something more useful to put in one or two of those slots than a chant.
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