I always conceive my DAW projects like orchestral scores meant to be played by live musicians, in that there is a specific complement of players in mind, and every passage corresponds to a specific player or players, and by extension, a specific position on the stage. In MIR, I've created one role for each player/position.
On the other hand, in the DAW, I have one track for each virtual instrument I'm using, and these don't correspond one-to-one with the players/positions/roles; I choose which virtual instruments to use for which passages on a case-by-case basis. For example, I'm currently working on a piece that has three bassoon parts, and have four bassoon tracks; two from Acoustic Samples, one from SWAM, and one from Embertone. For passages involving two bassoons in harmony, I usually use the two Acoustic Samples tracks, which means that in a passages for bassoons 1 and 2, the Acoustic Samples tracks will go in the bassoon 1 and 2 roles, while in a passage for bassoon 2 and 3, they'll go in the bassoon 2 and 3 roles. For passages for three bassoons in harmony, I usually use the two Acoustic Samples tracks and the SWAM track, where which role the SWAM track goes in depends on the voicings and context. For passages for three bassoons in unison that have vibrato, I usually use one Acoustic Samples track, the SWAM track, and the Embertone track so I can have three different scripted vibrato implementations going at once.
What this means for my workflow is that I label each region with what role it should have, and I bounce each passage to audio separately, making sure that each track is assigned to the right role for that passage before I do. This is quite cumbersome. I could in principle get around the need to shuffle a given track through different roles for different passages by having separate tracks not just for each virtual instrument, but for each combination of virtual instrument and role. I'm not doing this because the number of tracks this would entail would be staggering. Ideally, there would be a way to automate the role changes so I wouldn't have to do it manually. I figure it's a long shot, but is there a way to do that? If not, is there some alternative I should consider?
