Those alesis look nice too......damn more chioces.

For years and years, Roland has led the world in the sophistication of
their electronic drums.

This has had to do almost entirely with their 'brains' and not there actual drums.

All the drums on the market use piezo styled elements. The piezo noise buzzers that you buy
for $6 at Radio Shack are the identical elements used in the most sophisticated of the pads
out today (although some pads have multiple triggers in them).

A student of mine's father, just went out and bought a Roland Brain, made his own pads (even using the cool responsive
silent mesh heads that Roland uses) and saved himself a thousand bucks in the price difference. It took a bit of research and time to build the heads, but a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks.

That being said, I agree with kage that since you'll be using Battery and it's sounds, don't work about the controller.

Since you want to trigger Battery (for it's sounds I wouldn't recommend any existing electronic drumkit just for the mere fact
that sounds go in and out of favor. Buy an expensive electronic drumset and you will regret that it has a closed architecture
five years down the line.

Instead, you have the right idea...............use Battery and then upgrade your own samples as style and your music evolves.

Now, how to trigger them and what to use to create those midi messages to send to Battery.

Here's an article on creating pads inexpensively
www.electronicdrums.com/pads/pads2.htm

There approach uses REMO pracise pads and simple piezo pickups but , honestly, you can go to ebay and buy used pads cheaply
or you can make your own out of a heavy piece of rubber glued to a backing piece of wood for vastly cheaper.

Then, go find yourself a used Alesis D4 or D5 Midi Drum Module.

There are inputs on the back of those units for I believe 6 or so drum pads.

The Pads you build or buy drive the Alesis D4 or D5 which then sends midi signals
to Battery using whatever midi interface you are using.

It's the very cheapest way to get an electronic drum machine together. Just a couple of hundred bucks for
the D4 and another $50-$200 to construct the pads.

((((())))))))
Frequently, if you are going to be using your tracks for your own songs, you are going to want to go in after the fact and
tweak your performance inside of Battery to get more nuance out of it (unless you are already a killer trained drummer with a great sense of how to translate real drumming into the latency dominated world of electronic drums.

There are things you can do to program somewhat realistic crashes and hi hat parts but Midi's 127 increments and samplers' inability
to incorporate fixed frequencies in drums and cymbals (the thunk of the stick on a tom tom, doesn't go up in pitch as the drum head does , slightly when you hit it hard.............this just can't be modelled super convincingly in programming (though like I said, there Are programming tricks that are helpful ---- for what it's worth, and I'm not writing this as a commercial, KeyFax has a new series of instructional videos on professional drum computer programming, including a volume that I just did for them a few months back)

If you want really realistic drums, then do as many pro producers do in pop, program your kicks and snares and record real time
hi hat and cymbal parts over them. There is a degree of a reasonable suspension of disbelief if a human being hears reall cymbals
and programmed drums. Here 30% real where it counts (all the nuance in a typical hi hat track, timbrally speaking) and the brain buys that it's all real.

Of course, a lot of electronic couldn't give a flying F*!& about realism in drum tracks.
In this case, the name of the game is rhythmic, timbral and processing creativity.

Then, the sky's the limit.

In the late 80's there were pads called DAUZ pads.
What I liked about them is that they were small (6"),
made of quiet gum rubber (I always hated the clicking sound
of harder plastiic electronic drum pads) and you could place them
around an acoustic kit in such a way that they didn't look obviously
electronic.

I've always found that by mixing 1/3 electronic/sampled percussion sounds
in with acoustic percussion that audiences 'buy' the reasonable suspension of disbelief '
and assume that what they are listening to is 'real' and not a sample