It's a four-piece -- me singing and playing piccolo and regular bass, as well as playing trumpet on some stuff
a drummer playing an electronic kit with a different drum sound for most of the tracks, so we can replicate the various drum sounds on the recordings -- some acoustic sounding, some electronic sounding, some a combination in between. He's very good at sounding like a drum machine when he needs to.
a guitarist translating some of my piccolo bass rhythm parts -- we gave up on him playing the parts on baritone guitar, as this created a wall of mud combined with the piccolo bass. The higher register of the guitar helps even out the sound.
a keyboardist playing bass lines, triggering arpeggios, sound effects, and various other stuff as necessary, including orchestral parts....I have as a goal doing full orchestral pieces eventually -- we've experimented with this in rehearsal and it might, I say might, work live. I have a good software orchestra. For example, I learned a John Barry piece, 007, and translated the orchestration into midi, and it sounded decent. I uploaded that file into the snocap music store on the myspace page -- by double clicking it you can hear 30 seconds of it.
we also cheat and use a sequence on some stuff -- for instance, when there's two simultaneous drum parts, and it just wouldn't sound right otherwise. However, the ambition for the orchestral material is not to use a sequence at all, but do it entirely and completely live.
Oy!
