Thanks for the comments so far guys, I shall respond fully in due course, but just to jump in on what
@PaulAds and
@pompeyjazz are saying:
I probably didn't explain myself very well...
The only instrument I play is the piano/keyboards, plus a bit of basic drumming, but I got no drums.
The piano in my songs I obviously play, but don't record the audio, just the midi to trigger a sampled piano that sounds better than mine. In this case it was one of Native Instruments offerings, The Grandeur I think.
Drums- I either play them on midi keyboard and then tweak them in the editor or more often get a basic beat from the Logic Drummer feature and then tweak that.
Guitar, how I wish I'd learned to play guitar - if you were to go back and listen to some of my very early songs (please don't), you would notice that there's either no guitar or just single note snippets, played on the keyboard.
After much searching I came across some packages that allow you to play the chord sequence on the keyboard, which will then trigger the same chords being played by a guitarist playing them, that was recorde/sampled. (I think). I can then go in and tweak them to a certain extent, and of course as you said, chop them up.
The bass in this is a standard Logic patch. I think it's synthesised rather than sampled, but I'm not entirely sure.
The strings are again played on keyboard, using a combination in this case of a logic violin sample and native instruments session strings.
I then spend hours and hours and days and hours (ask my wife) tweaking, editing, mixing, eq'ing, automating....to try to get it all to fit together and sound somewhere close to authentic.
With this song I'd say it took about 20% of the time to write the song and the other 80% to do all of the above.
So that's kind of my process, not sure if I'm technically write when I said it's all midi and samples, but that's how I perceive it.
Oh and the singing of course, I have not sampled myself...yet....so I do actually do that.
Yodasdad
