using electronic drums for midi writing.

Have you ever tried one of the MPC midi controllers? How do you get on with playing the drum parts off a midi keyboard?  I program through an MPC 60 (or sometimes with my 2000XL) but always used to just play it in live through a good weighted keyboard.

no mate - I don't mean playing them out live - I mean playing in the beat realtime.  But I guess that's what you meant by "keyboard" there was me thinking you meant the mouse and keyboard (!) I get yer now.

if i bought one it'd be strictly mesh heads, because i want to be able to practice properly on it, and with the higher spec ones they sound pretty good/acceptable on stage too. i've got about £1000 budget. 

yes i agree that it'lll never be the same as the real thing, but for my intended use, practice and producing, it'd be more than adequate.

I use aDDrum 4 with mesh heads, works a treat, you can just set a click track going on logic / cubase and drum away, then come back to the midi youve recorded and chop out loops and fills, its far far better way of getting ideas down than playing things in on a keyboard.  Better than audio to as you can go in and edit / quantise.

Yeah as Stu said you just record MIDI notes like with a keyboard, The DDrum has 8 different notes for each drum, you get a different midi note depending on where you hit the head, dosent work with the mesh heads unfortunatly, you only get 1 note, not sure how this works on v drums.  

If you dont want to spend tons the thomann cheepo mesh head kits are quite good, there modules arnt great but you can get a software package like ez dummer or BFD.

Ive got tons of dnb kits in my sampler, mainly choped up breaks, velocity crossfade on the ghost snares,  hours of fun.

TBH i only really usethe electric kit for playing with different sounds thease days, i recon if you want a drum kit that sounds like a accoustic kit, get an accoustic kit.  The DDrum really taught me to apprecate the sututies of playing an accoustic kit, you just dont get the dynamics, or anything like with an electric kit, but it keeps the neabours happy.

yeah it's possible. Just buy some drum pads and a midi interface and you're all set. I also had this idea once of taking an acoustic drum kit, mic the snare, kick, .. connect them via audiointerface into logic, into fruityloops. then send those signals to different mixer channels, and add a peak controller (logic will have something like that too but i don't know that yet). The peak controller will register the signal when you hit the drum (you gotta put something on the drums so they won't sound like they normally sound) but it won't play the actualy sound of the drumstick hitting the drum. You link the peak controllers to some drumsamples, so it triggers those samples when you hit your drum. I haven't tried that out yet but i think it should work well :)