I say you can use sticks, play at all volumes from soft, to medium and loud.  You can great tone at all levels especially at the softer levels.  Your sense of time can still have a nice energy and feel confident and push nice at any volume.  That sort of thing is not confined to one volume. 
 
Dave one thing I did years ago when rehearsing bands is to set up like a gig at a rehearsal and make a stereo recording a reasonable distance back.  Playback and listen how loud the drums and all the instruments are. How out of balance everything is.  The drums will leap out.  Sometimes drummers just need too hear how bad it sounds and how ridiculous drummers can play out of balance with everything else.  It is an art playing in balance and requires great skill. It requires the drummer to really listen out to everything that is going on around and how they are fitting into the equation. 
 
Drummers often play the snare too loud as well.  Kicks and toms need a little bit of power but the snare is a very loud drum and can be balanced into the bands music very nicely.  It does not need to be belted all the time.  Crash symbols can be much softer too. Rides as well. Hats even. They will cut right through.
 
I have played 3 feet away from a couple dining in a Jazz trio and in a loud stadium. They require different approaches. There are times louder playing is needed for sure.  Most often than not though it can half what many drummers are playing at now.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. Sorry I didn't reply sooner but I've been in the hospital.
 
The drummer is already using Hot Rods, as evidenced by the hundreds of little bits of wood scattered around our rehearsal space. They self-destruct pretty quickly, and are relatively expensive. I think he pays over a hundred bucks for a pack of 6 pairs.
 
I've been thinking about a semi-electronic approach. Dampen the snare down to essentially a practice pad, then trigger a drum module from it. If it's just the snare, the PA should be able to handle it. But I'm thinking it would be awkward for him to hear even the slightest latency. It would really need an amp right beside the drums in order to keep latency to an adaptable level. I have a pair of keyboard amps that I currently only use for practice, each with a 12" woofer. They could handle the whole kit, I think.
 
Anybody ever try that? Building a hybrid part-acoustic part-electronic kit?

Sounds like he is still hitting hard.  I have had several pairs of rods and they are still completely whole!  He is hitting them harder in order to make the same amount of sound a stick would whacking a snare drum.  It is one of the loudest drums that drummers can get wrong so easily.  He would be better off using sticks and playing quieter. Rods sound better played softly.  Then you really hear the sound of individual rods contacting the snare head. Although a very fast flam say this sound is easily picked up if the stroke level is not too loud either.  You can capture this sound and to sounds killer.  Fat. The note is wider. Whacking a rod is more akin to using a single solid tip. 
 
Try this experiment.  Try letting a stick fall under its own weight  from about 6" up.  One end of the stick should swing on your finger about 3" up from the edge of the head.  Listen to how much sound it makes.  Well, the snare drum has something to do with it too.  A Sonor snare (wood or steel) sounds loud doing this!  A drummer only has to add little more energy to snare drum strokes in order to achieve quite a high volume in the whole room.  One can wish.
 
I am in an interesting situation now.  Mixing a tribute show.  They do three sets one for Orbison, a British song collection say around 60's and a 70's American song collection.  I am enjoying pulling a good FOH sound while not to have to sweat the music.  The drummer I am working with has a Pearl electronic kit with nice pads triggering. The snare is electronic too.  He uses real hats though and sometimes a real crash and ride etc.  This sounds very nice and natural as well.  He has the electronic cymbal hitters as well.  (Note the original balance from him was wrong though. Electronic kit Drummers also don't know how to balance the kit pieces leaving a drum brain.  Drums need to be all in balance.  Keep the reverbs to fast and subtle effects. Setting velocities is real important to your playing style and dynamics. Hats and cymbals mixed right down and add some crispness.  Many brains have amazing production processing that is going on inside) It still takes the same amount of time to set up an electronic kit as it does for me to set up my Sonor kit. 
 
Got to say though. Once you get this right the drums can sound amazing.  Out front and on stage too.  I have got full drum brain PA splits in stereo from him of course.  He can fiddle his monitor levels without interference to me.  Drum sounds are very consistent now from venue to venue as well.  Once I get the PA out front sounding nice to the room (a la Steely Dan ref mixes out front tell you everything!) The drum sound tends to slot right in with a minimum of fuss. 
 
Now this sort of thing does allow more control over the overall stage sound.  It takes a surprising amount of amps and speaker power would you believe to achieve anything is remotely close to a loud Sonar kit say.  Our drummer has two monitors next to him.  One on top of the other.  Both powerful active full range boxes.  The drums come out of the lower one for him and he is letting himself mostly hear it too.  So this is good.  It also creates quite a nice amount on stage for the rest of them.  Not too much though.  I have three foldback mixes and the drummer is one of them.  His top speaker does the vocals and the rest of the music.  The others all have nice active wedges and I can slip some drum sounds into any of them as well.  This all does work rather nice and you can control the amount of stage sound.  Still got a reasonably loud guitarist and bass player to contend with which can sometimes over power the PA, but I can usually keep them under control.  They are nice fellas and listen to me.  We are using backing tracks too which the drummer controls.  He wears one headphone in this situation to hear the click.  The backings out front are clear and in stereo too.  I have mixed them.  I blend them into the live channels.  The line between the backing and the band is real blurred there too. 
 
The fabulous thing about this though is his ability to switch entire kits to suit all the songs involved.  You can carefully go through all your set lists and call up a range of kits.  Not major changes all the time either.  Keep some kicks while changing snares etc and toms.  Some of those big Orbison numbers need the fat deep rock 80's snare like She's Got It.  But in the 60's Beatles stuff, that older English rock kit needs to be pulled up, and it can. The 70's American disco songs need some change ups too.  It's all good and the kit changes can add a lot of colour to the show.
 
 

bitflipper
Anybody ever try that? Building a hybrid part-acoustic part-electronic kit?

I didn't quite build a hybrid kit, but I did convert an old remo practice kit into an electronic kit back in the early 90's when electronic kits cost a fortune. I still use it today.
 
Basically I used some zinc which I cut into 4" discs, then taped a piezo transducer onto the middle of the disc which was connected to a 3.5mm jack socket. I then sliced the foam inside the practice pad in half horizontally, and put the disc inside so it's basically sandwiched in the middle. I did this on each pad, and connected them to an Alesis DM5. I use a standard piano style sustain pedal as my hihat pedal.
 
There's no reason why you couldn't stick a zinc disc to the underside of a practice pad, but I guess the gain will need to be turned down - those piezo transducers are sensitive. The DM5 is great for tweaking the gain and velocity curve to suit, but you'll always end up with a bit of a hot-spot around where the piezo is.
 
I've not noticed any latency in my setup, but I guess there's no MIDI involved when using the internal sounds of the DM5.
 
BTW - you don't need to use zinc, a coffee tin lid or anything will do. I used zinc as it was easy to cut, and also helped to reduce the hotness of the signal, whilst still spreading the pickup area to the whole of the disc area.
 
M.
 
 

Wow, that's some inspiring DIY, Mark. The kind of project I would have gleefully dove into 30 years ago. Age has made me lazy. I was hoping there might be some inexpensive transducer, kind of like Drumagog in hardware form.

all the way back in 1984,
our drummer was sticking piezo pickups on his snare, and triggering samples with a roland device...
simple, effective, he could even put a practice pad on his snare head and hit that, muting the physical snare, whilst triggering the sample and amplifying that at any level, for those tricky gigs where they wanted a human jukebox, instead of an actual live band!
 
he could do his entire kit sometimes.

Check out pintech.com.  They are an electronic kit manufacturer and started taking on conversions a few years back. They have some simple triggers and mesh head sizes from 8" to 26".  I'm not sure how those mesh heads will hold up though, still sounds like he's hitting hard to me too but may be worth a try.  I also don't know if you can get their drum module (brain) without a kit but there are other brands too.

I took an old DD-55 (Yamaha) drum box, and added a set of 1/4" jacks to the back and soldered in connections to each pad. I connect those pads to my TD-3 drum brain. I use my regular bass drum and HH pedals directly into the brain. all of it sits on a snare stand. not great but very portable and the sounds are generally good. simply feed the stereo output of the brain to a bass amp or PA and you're good. I use the bass amp (100w single 15" w/ some treble eq added etc) approach when there is only a small PA so as not to overload it when there are vocals and perhaps keys going through it. the bass amp give some oomph to the kick and low tom.
https://www.bing.com/imag...HDRSC2&adlt=strict
I can also use the internal sounds for hand percussion where i'm not even using sticks... so overall versatile..

If he is slamming that hard and shredding the bundle sticks that fast in an effort to make the bundle sticks as loud as regular hickory sticks, it might be associated with deep-seated issues that go well beyond technique.
 
Try (very gently) suggesting an anger management course.

quantumeffect
If he is slamming that hard and shredding the bundle sticks that fast in an effort to make the bundle sticks as loud as regular hickory sticks, it might be associated with deep-seated issues that go well beyond technique.
 
Try (very gently) suggesting an anger management course.

Or maybe he's having a great time?  
 
I'm a studio only player, so I can play with a lot of dynamics and yet I break sticks a lot.  Part of it is technique, in that I like to hit the rim and snare head at the same time for that signature crack sound it makes.  I love how that sounds. It's only for the loud passages, of course, but that's enough.  A wide dynamic range still provides for hard hitting, depending on the context.  
 
Yes you can play drums lightly.  And you can pick your guitar strings and your bass lightly too.  But how much fun is that?  If I'm getting paid, and it's worth it, then I'd gladly quiet down.  But if I'm mainly doing this for the fun of it and the money is just a small compensatory gesture, then I'm going to have a good time and get into it.  
 
Drummers chose the instrument that involves hitting and kicking things.  They connect to the music emotionally through hitting and kicking.  It shouldn't be surprising that hitting and kicking will get louder when they get into it.