I'm thinking about collaborating more with live instrumentalists and vocalists. For those who've done this before, what was your experience? What worked well, what didn't? How did you find performers? What was your process like?

Also: if you play an instrument or sing and want to collab, let me know!

One of my best friends plays guitar and bass and I've had them in songs basically ever since we met lol
Honestly I've had zero problem, just send and receive wav files and that's about it
If anything perhaps time is the only downside, taking a bit too long and stuff, but nothing annoying or anything.
I'll tell you how my experience with a vocalist goes in like, 2 weeks i guess lol

To clarify, do you mean local performers to collaborate with live, or instrumentalists online or in person that can record stuff for you?

I was thinking more of the latter situation, but both would be cool!

i've only ever really collaborated with people i already knew to some extent, but generally whenever i've reached out to those people, they've been interested and/or excited to do the thing! Elemental Fusion

is 100% collaborations with instrumentalist friends, and i very much want to do another project in that vein, perhaps in deeper collaboration with the peoples - in most of the cases on Elemental Fusion the instrumentalist part came first, and i went from there... but it'd be fun to do some planning and songwriting too.

in terms of "what works", i think you wanna be looking for the same stuff as you would in a song-writing collab, which is just synergy more than anything, a reason to be collaborating where both of you can have fun. i haven't really had a bad experience doing this ever, so i'm not sure what else to avoid! it's bound to be a lot different commissioning strangers. maybe the first place i'd think of looking would be Bluesky? or word of mouth from asking friends.

So far I have only been on the side of recording live parts (accordion) for someone else and it was a ton of fun while also somewhat stressful. I'd say it went very well and was a great learning experience for me to improve at recording. It's so cool to try see someone's vision and deliver something authentic and (hopefully) much better than a simple vst. I also got paid a lot which was very nice ofc.

I don't have much else to add, but maybe this thread could point you in the direction of some instrumentalists on BotB? Though of course not everyone who responded would feel comfortable doing instrumental collabs.

Now I'm wondering if we should make a lyceum article of BotBrs who can record instruments, similar to the hardware renderists list...

Combining chipping and instruments stopped being interesting to me a long time ago so I don't have anything to say on that score; however if you ever want guitar or piano parts (contingent on me finding a good spot to record piano) don't hesitate to ask. I'd be willing to try reading, working with you on it, improv or whatever, no guarantee it turns out any certain way obviously, lol. Possibly some banjo as well, especially tenor banjo. Or if you wanted to talk about coming up with good parts for those instruments