Hey Ragan, can you tell me about your vdrum sd3 setup?

Hi.  Yeah sure.  I've got the Roland TD-25KV kit and I just go MIDI-via-USB into my computer the same way I do with MIDI controller keyboards.  SD3 has good presets for various MIDI drum kits and the TD-25 preset works well.  I always play with the velocity envelopes in SD3, which is easy and quick.  And once you have SD3 translating your V Drums MIDI the way you want, you can just save that as an SD3 preset.  There's a window in SD3 where you can pull the limits one way or another.  So say you want the snare drum to be being hit at a lower velocity, you can just pull the upper limit down to limit those upper values or you can pull the side limits in or out to skew the overall MIDI values on that drum.  

Latency is still a problem though, for me anyway.  I'm on a 2011 iMac and I can't crank the buffer down on a full session.  So when I track, I'm just monitoring the Roland drum sounds.  I go out a headphone out of my interface into the Roland aux in and I use Slate Batch Commander on a little iPad stand over by the drums.  The Roland brain has a separate knob for blending in the aux audio so I can choose how much of the mix I hear vs how much of the V Drums I hear.  Batch Commander on the iPad lets me run the DAW (I made some buttons for new playlist, record, undo, save, play, stop, etc).  The Roland sounds are fun enough to play, but aren't in the same universe as SD3, which just sounds like real drums.  I've got a new machine coming in a couple of weeks and one of the very first things I'll be sussing out is if I can track through SD3 and not have to monitor the Roland sounds.  But I can't stand latency so that buffer is gonna have to be way down.  

Hope that's helpful.  

Might want to also look into the mesh heads on real drums with triggers thing. Went deep into that about three years ago with a Roland TD-20 (I think, I'd have to break it out).

Like ragan said, the latency is the challenge, but you can sort that out. For jamming when the kids are down, completely doable. Even with acoustic drums, as long as you have the mesh heads.

Edit: just to avoid being vague, searched old emails. Here's where I ended up:

Search out Jman. He's got a site with a bunch of options for triggers, Billy Blast mesh heads and such. I bought some stuff from him including his hi-hat stand. There's some stuff about the TD-12 and TD-20's and "3-zone" shit that takes hours to sort through, but may be useful.