I like recording with other musicians. I look at it as if we're playing what we do, but have some extra voices/instruments to embellish things. I agree that recordings are different than live performance. I did a bare bones recording of ballads a couple years back. When I talked about adding other instruments my life partner, Susan, pointed out that in this case we didn't want anything to get in the way of the words. It worked very well I thought. On the other hand, when I'm selling CD's at shows people tend to want the instrumental projects that have some extra people on them.