OK..... late to the party.

On the OP... yeah, using the real tracks has made me sort of lazy. It's certainly quicker and easier to render a real track than to drag out the guitars. tune up, set up the mics, run a number of tracks and record a decent track.

At the same time, it does inspire me to play the guitars more...and mandolin as well. So it's a toss up weighted towards the "makes me lazy" side of the issue.

As far as the real tracks and artifacts..... absolutely yes! This has been the one downside I have found to using certain instruments in RB. The lead guitars especially. Most often they sound OK and a non-guitarist might be fooled but a real picker will notice immediately the mushiness of the sound in certain styles of playing. My latest tune (Kandahar) is a good example of this. It's especially noticeable with good speakers or cans.

I thought that was due to not having the audiophile version but I noticed that it's not always like that. I know that I need to select tempo as close to my project as possible or less than the project tempo, but how do you know the original key the sample was recorded in? (Maybe I need to look closer at the other columns in real tracks?) If I choose a RT with a faster tempo the artifacts are very noticeable with just about every instrument. So it's exact or less than for the tunes to sound halfway decent.

Mixing and mastering is a real joy using BB/RT as my backing tracks since half the work in mastering is to have decent sounding tracks to begin with.

Agreed.... this is one of the more interesting threads here in quite some time.

You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
You can make excuses or you can make progress but not both.

The magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding.