[QUOTE="brodown:1188944"
You said also "you can hear different velocities on a real kit clear as a bell too." You must have misconstrued something, because that was exactly my point. A drum kit has an infinite ability for dynamic musical expression, and while using triggers/samples, be it on an ekit or an acoustic kit, you electronically regiment your dynamics into discrete steps. Regardless of how many steps that may be, you're forcefully limiting the dynamic abilities of your instrument, no?

As for the matter of dynamics/velocity/what is "harder" to do...I think we're using the same words to say two different things. I will certainly not argue that playing fast and quiet is a really difficult thing to train your brain & muscles to do. Playing quiet is hard for all musicians, especially drummers. Playing quiet can be hard, playing slow can be hard, playing fast can be hard, playing loud can be hard. Playing any kind of music well is hard. When this all started, I was specifically talking about playing loud enough to be audible in various live situations, in which case I have to put forth maximum physical effort into the pedals to be heard.

To elaborate a little more, I play in a grind band. At our gig last Saturday, my genius band members thought full stacks for everyone was a great idea. We were in a small venue, where there was a vocal PA, but no snare or kick mic. Nothing else was miced—all acoustic goodness. This is not an uncommon sonic situation for me. (I don't want to get into a debate over the stupidity of this situation. As much as it makes my musical life more difficult, the "louder is better" mantra usually holds true live, especially to a metal crowd, so I can see where my guitarists are coming from even if it grinds my gears sometimes. For the sake of argument, let’s just take that situation as a given.)

In cases like that, I HAVE to hit hard, every stroke, or else the sound gets lost. It is very, very, very difficult to get enough volume to cut through that acoustically, and I have to put forth more physical effort to make it work. I could easily back off, put in less physical effort, and get lost in the mix. It also takes a good deal of muscle control to play at “maximum” volume and keep the timbre of the drum consistent. What I’m saying is that playing loud, fast, consistent, and managing to keep a solid groove all at the same time is pretty fucking difficult. Removing any of those variables makes it less challenging.
I see grind / death / whatever bands all the time where the blasts start flying and the volume drops to an inaudible level. It is just a huge pet peeve of mine. My feeling is that if the audience can't hear you, it really doesn't matter what you're playing. Sure, a sound guy can fuck that up, but that's essentially out of my control. I prefer to focus on what I have control over, which is the tonal quality of the drums and my playing.

The stamina and dexterity required to play THAT loud and THAT fast is pretty extreme, and its much more difficult to pull that off than playing at equal speed at a reduced volume. When I first started playing out w/Hivesmasher, this was a real issue for me. I felt like I could either play the tunes correctly and get lost in the wall of sound, or I could bash the fuck out of everything, play sloppy, and hope the audience didn’t realize. (This was usually the option if whisky was involved.) Through a lot of hard work, I've come a lot closer to what I consider the ideal for that style of music—loud, groovy, and consistent. Please don't take this as me saying my playing is perfect or anything like that--its far from it. I've still got a lot of work to do. Regardless, while I wouldn’t debate that it is more difficult to play at that speed at an extremely low dynamic level, until we start seeing more metal acts playing acoustic gigs, I don’t really find that relevant to this discussion. Most people want loud when they go to see heavy music.

From what I've seen out and about, I get the impression that often when triggers are used, they're used to help keep the volume level up while the power behind the stroke goes down, or to keep the timbre of the sound constant, independent of how the instrument is stricken. I don't particularly care to hear the same drum sample over and over again in a live performance (or the same 3, 6, 12, whatever drum samples over and over again, if that's how many dynamics steps you have) so I’d rather make sure my stuff sounds good and do my damndest to play loud enough to be heard. FWIW, I'm not talking about the quality of the sample itself, or the quality of the triggers--I'm just not a fan of samples in metal. Chalk it up to artistic differences I guess, but I (usually) like my heavy music to be raw and real.

We could go on about this for years…so to sum this up: The way I'm seeing it, if you WANT an infinite ability to express music through dynamics, triggers/samples by their very nature limit your ability to do so by diving the continuum of dynamics into discrete steps. If you want consistent timbre and/or volume level, independent of the velocity used to strike the drum (depending on your settings), triggers will allow you achieve that. What you do with it from there is up to the individual, and your personal artistic preferences.

Am I missing something here?