Thump, a lot of that has to do with what your end game is. If you want to put out a high end CD and try to sell tens of thousands of units, live players would probably be a better option. I don't know if you ever heard Matt's CD but I bought it and it is a strong work. A lot depends on your feelings about the genre but then we get into that old discussion about levels of listening again and we've done that in several forms already.

If you write for YOU (and in my case I have pretty much laid it down anymore) then by all means you Real Band it up because you can turn out a good product with it. My CD was about 80% Real band. Nobody would know if I didn't tell them. We have no way to know if we are hearing all manually played tracks or not. We can't spot them like we can spot autotune on vocals.