Hi Trimble,
I ran across this vid on YouTube a while back. The fellows name is Don Beem. Since you mentioned steel drums, I thought it might be a good demo to start with--also watch his vid entitled 'WX5 Vid 1', as it shows some of the equipment he is using. Hopefully this will help get us on the same page, because in my mind, you seem to be asking about the recording process more than any thing else. If I'm reading you wrong then feel free to toss this--it's just my 2 cents worth anyway and ymmv, and so on.

So--my answer to "..Question...Is this valid approach?" is --yes it is valid but can be improved on tremendously by adding more inputs into your pc. If you had, for example, an m-audio delta 1010lt, you could mike your drums and record your performance on multiple tracks. True, you will still have some bleed, but you can still (quickly) do a lot with your tracks, such as adding a little 'verb to the snare, etc,etc. The way you are thinking about doing it now will get you there, but I think you're going to find it very time consuming to get the exact mix you want for your recordings.

I think you'll find RB to be quite capable for your daw. I know for a fact that if I wanted to make a backing track similar to the first vid, I could fire up RB and have it finished in short order. Of course, I have a very nice soft-synth also, so I'm not totally dependend on realtracks. But the nice thing abour RB is you can go all midi, all realtracks, or any combination thereof, whatever works. Hope this helps and welcome to the forums.

links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqECkw55vTY&feature=channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6486c7TnZE&feature=channel

Later,
Jim

I'd be completely happy if I had just one more guitar.