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I recently finished a romp through SoU/HotU with a Barbarian/Bard/RDD, by endgame he was bbn5/brd12/RDD10 IIRC, and he was surprisingly effective. Because of wearing chainmail and using a shield the chance of arcane spellcasting failure was quite high, so spells were used to buff up before a fight rather than offensively during. Which is also why I focused the feats towards melee combat (power attack, cleave, etc.) and didn't take things like combat casting, spell penetration and the metamagic feats.
If you opt for Fighter instead of Ranger, it makes sense to get to ftr4 ASAP for Weapon Specialization, and take another level in Fighter when you hit the epics for Epic Weapon Spec. More than 10 levels of RDD for such a build would arguably be wasted, so you'd end up with much the same as mine described above, only with Fighter instead of Barbarian. Taking more Fighter-levels will net you some bonus feats and a better BAB, but you'd have to do that before you become epic, otherwise you'll forego the increased BAB. It's just a question of whether you want the focus to be on fighter or bard.
But I would recommend Fighter over Ranger for this build though. A Ranger's strengths are his free dual-wielding, which can easily be attained with the Fighter's bonus feats as well, and his spellcasting, which in this case would require you to pump extra statpoints into WIS and to get quite a lot of levels in Ranger to become useful.
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