My vision has been to largely create with virtual instruments (aka MIDI) with recordings of real instruments folded in where possible. That was one of my goals in learning violin and, yes, penny whistle. The best thing I can say about the Khajiit piece is, due to the peculiarities of the arrangement, I can perform all the parts on physical instruments.
This is also one of the downsides. It depends on my performance, in every instrument above. There's no place I can use a keyboard or a drum track to give more of a gloss.
I would have done better with a jazz piece. See, this is almost a tone poem, using instruments coloristically. And that makes the parts very hard to perform. The thing that a more standard setting gives you is a well-defined rhythm and well-defined harmonic structure. Having that bass and drums behinds you pulls you along in the right meter and on to the right pitches. The Khajiit parts, instead, sort of float out there -- as witnessed by the fact I found it as easy if not easier to record some of them in isolation to nothing but a metronome track.
Most of this has been using the extremely basic Behringer U-control USB interface that came with my MIDI keyboard, with an AudioBuddy pre-amp and phantom power unit in front of it. I tried recording a couple of the violin tracks at work; I brought a Zoom recorder with me to the shop, and dialed up a metronome application on the iPhone.
Everything gets assembled in Reaper:
That's barely a quarter of the tracks there. Another disadvantage to this piece; it is all about changing tone colors, meaning I'm basically playing in little more than a couple bars at a time. There's not really a chance to get into the flow of the piece and the performance I'm trying to contribute to the mix. Just do my best to stay within the tempo and hit the right notes.
At the moment I'm at ukulele (my $40 Rogue) standing in for lute; plucked, slow-strummed, and fast-strummed with ras accents. There may be more. Violin (my student-model Pfetchner) in sustained lines and in some improvised harmonics for a spooky effect. Bodhran (my Pakistani-made 18" tune-able) with tipper, rolls, fingertip, scratching and brushing, and stick accents. The wooden soprano recorder I've had since childhood and a Yamaha ABS alto. Crumhorn (a sadly out of pitch Susato in brown ABS), and shawm (a bombarde from Lark in the Morning at Fisherman's Wharf, sporting a badly fit oboe reed these days).
So, back to working method. I imported the original version of the song into Reaper as track one. Then went through my libraries to find virtual instruments (instruments I could play from the MIDI keyboard) with similar sounds to those physical instruments I would be recording.
The opening riff was just a matter of using my ear and matching what was on the original recording. The "theme" was more difficult; as the original was spoke-sung, I had to go into notation mode, type in the lyrics, and line those up in time with the original recording. Then I could work out a melody track that sort-of echoed the speech patterns of the original, and stayed somewhere in range of the chord structure.
Since there are sections of multi-part harmony I worked that out here, too. Actually, I disliked the violin harmony and when I was at the shop recording those parts I took out some music paper and worked out new voice leading there. A not-small advantage of this technique is I can play the mock-up of the part back and learn the line by ear from there (I'm still not much of a sight-reader).
So call it a noble experiment. I'm still nowhere near ready to embark on the big Tomb Raider piece I have in mind. So I'm hunting around now for something jazzy. Something with a more straight-forward rhythm and harmonic progression I can really feel like I'm jamming to when I record in the parts. And, yeah...maybe something with a trumpet part or two.
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