Another way to do it is to bounce the cymbal to a wav and cut it off where you want and put a short fade on it. It sounds pretty good.

I will experiment with all these great suggestions.  Thanks to all!!!

The closed, pedal, and open hihats are mute grouped by default on all of SD3's kits, so looking at the code for those kit pieces and then using it by copying and replacing the relevant lines would be the rout I would take. Then assign an empty key to the choke group and you should be good to go.