For the Neo Soul genre I would recommend using live instruments when for things like saxophone or horns rather than the plugins. There are indeed many professional sounding plugins out there however they will never sound the same as the real thing, especially if you use quantization.
These type of plugins are generally best for electronic music or the main stream.
Check out the track I made below which uses a live saxophone recording. Imagine if I made this using a VST, it just Wouldn’t sound the same.
https://soundcloud.com/goldshift/winter-projects-with-sax
Nice beat mate. Love the sax.
Neo soul style music definitely requires live instruments as much as possible.
Depends on the VST or sounds you are using. Live is always better but there are ways to get around if you don’t have the ability to get to live instruments.
There are some good live VST library out there but they are very expensive and space / CPU consuming. Even if you don’t have a band, better to get a friend, family or colleague to play and record. Even if it’s just a 8 or 16 bar loop.