Depends on how fast is fast, but I mostly agree that slower is harder in a "band" situation. If you're playing lots of strokes, it's easy for the rest of the band to play along because they can hear them all. If you're playing less strokes, there's more counting in your head and the band can't hear the count between the strokes and you have to "come in" at the same time. So slow is all about precision and speed is more forgiving.

Slow.
While playing fast may be physically demanding. Playing slow is musically more difficult. It's all that space between the notes.

As a drummer of perhaps questionable saltworthiness, I am of the opinion that it is harder to play very, very fast since it involves questions of physical prowess and stamina. Playing very, very slowly is not trivial but it's more a question of being able to play *consistently* and slowly. You tend to drag the tempo up or add little bits to the drum part (snare strokes, hi-hat frosting) to give you something closer to a standard tempo to work with.

You only need the bass tom and a snare anyway.

I'm a very salty drummer and I find it easier to play slow, but that might just be my genetic predisposition. That and the fact that I was escorted into drumdom by Dale Crover.

Well, the joke goes: How do you know there's a drummer at your door?

The knock keeps getting faster...

Every musician has their strenths and weaknesses. For me what's really hard is playing slow *and soft*. Slow and loud (think Black Crowes 'Sometimes Salvation' or power ballad of your choice) is much easier, though still less forgiving than fast because of that space between beats that #1 mentions. Accuracy is the thing.

Slow and quiet is a bitch.. you just feel more exposed and it's easy to get too heavy-handed. For mellow songs, your job it to keep the thing moving along, maybe add some groove, but mostly just stay out of the way of the song.. (that applies to any song, really.. the less=more thing).

My other hang-up is that most drums just sound cooler when hit hard.. tone is so relative to volume. So it can be harder to love the sound of your drums when you're all slow and quiet.

Great jazz players (I am not one) who can do the brush work are the masters of slow...

There's good and bad fast drumming, good and bad slow drumming.

Very difficult to make direct comparisions.

ha! you don't ask this to a drummer! they'll tell you which is more difficult from their perspective.

but playing with drummers, or listening to them, and you get a different idea. it's the slow beats -- and keeping them in time -- that most drummers struggle to perfect. they just might not know it.

I guess I could give everyone some perspective on what I said.

I play in a very fast, heavy band (Aphiskkyu-Bot for anyone wanting to look us up, HA!), and most of the bands I've been in are also fast and heavy. Those drummers all say that building the physical stamina to play fast a lot is easy, and that once you're used to playing fast, it's pretty natural. They all want to go fast anyway. But when you slow things down in heavy music, to say the tempo of Asunder, it gets really hard. Like everyone else is saying, it's all about the spaces between what you're playing there. And when you're playing fast, no one's going to notice a little flub now and again, but when you're playing that slow.... even people who aren't paying attention to the drums at all will notice.

I'm not saying either is easy. I'm a drummer fetishist and I envy the shit out of anyone who can drum well, fast OR slow.