A midi primer here:

www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/MIDI/chapter3_DP5.shtml

I personally don't want to spend my days messing with the velocities of an english horn, to make it baroque. Either way.

THE ONLY test of the thing is the END result.

How you get there does not matter. You can spend 20 hours on 20 notes, or 20 hours playing 200 tunes. Whatever turns YOUR crank.

Take your backing tracks, done either way, and ask someone who's never played an instrument to critique it.

To my mind the biggest thing is to get realistic enough guitars. Almost every person over the age of 20 has had or has a close friend with one. On a given occasion, they can take it out, tune it a bit, and play 4 bars of Stairway...

They then are sort of experts and talk for days about pickups and humdingers and bucking this and amp that and delay with 800 feet of cable, and golly they could just improvise in the American National thing in front of 50,000 screaming fans, and become famous, oh yeah!

So the problem is your guitar has to sound very good. I'd suggest putting in the riff to Stairway in almost every piece, buried. LOL, there's a plugin to make!

John Conley
Musica est vita