Drummers - Advice Needed

If you want an answer to that then your best bet is to learn how to play air drums. Use items, whatever you can find, that are like sticks and brushes and time yourself. Keep in mind a drummer would be a bit faster than you.

I'd say a good drummer could drop one pair and grab another from a stickholder within a beat or two. When I played super fast metal I was dropping or breaking sticks every few songs (I wasn't exactly a pro) and I'd manage to get a fresh stick in my hand before I even missed the next beat a lot of the time. If not I'd usually be back in action in on the next beat or so. I didn't even have a stick holder. My extra sticks lived on top of my bass drum between the tuning lugs and the tom stems. Swapping out BOTH sticks at once would be a bit more complicated than that but it still should only take someone with fast hands a second.

My point is I wouldn't get to worried about trying to mimic something like that if you are creating a MIDI drum track. No one's gonna notice/nitpick. If you are writing the part with the intention of having a live drummer duplicate it at some point though just ask them or leave a few seconds for the switch. Preferably on something like a downbeat. That way the drummer can make his last stick hit, drop them as he's about to make his kick hit and scoop up the new sticks before the up beat. Also on that last stick hit before the switch try to incorporate a cymbal hit (like snare and cymbal) so the cymbal ringing out covers up any gap.

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I think I put way too much thought into that... but that's kind of a drummers mind. Making split second decisions on where your hands are gonna be at any given point in time.

Cheers.

There is no set time as each drummer has a different skill set for doing this. 

It depends on how good the drummer is on changing the sticks to brushes and visa versa. If the drummer isn't fast enough, he will need to practice it and maybe change his way of doing it.
Cj

I would think that in a studio environment with a live drummer, this issue would be eliminated by simply adding another track. Layering is done all the time, so there is no real realism issue unless you are going to make a video. Even then you could edit the transition out.

Listen to non-live tunes, and you can hear these tricks all the time. Most obvious is when the vocalist overlaps his or her own singing.

I agree with the people here that if it's being recorded, there is no need, just overdub if you have to.
 
If it is to be played live, then it does depend on the drummer.  Over the years as a gigging and studio drummer, I've developed all sorts of techniques for doing this kind of thing.  You don't necessarily have to swap both hands at once, and can make the changeover sound instantaneous, playing with one hand as you swap the other.