Thanks Robert.
My MIDI toolkit consists of the built-in Coyote sounds--I usually use this when I'm building my track, for convenience sake...later I switch out most of them to either SampleTank3 or a keyboard vst that I like called 4FrontRhode. I have ST4 but have never been able to install it properly. When working with MIDI, I either enter via my MIDI keyboard, but lots of times I'll key-enter into the piano roll tool in RealBand. For this particular project, I really needed brass sounds, and I found several that seemed "acceptable", but there are probably better samples available, but I'm not inclined to spend $$ on them.

In this project, I had a lot of unison notes with multiple brass tracks, and I like to use the "Randomize" feature in RB to avoid making the tracks all completely identical. Sometimes I'll render the midi track to a wav file so that I can add reverb or something, but SampleTank has good functionality to add effects to the midi sounds.