There’s a song I want to drop into Sunday morning’s service at church but, since most of the music group are unavailable this week, we don’t have time to rehearse until about an hour before the service itself. That isn’t critical as I can carry it mainly on bass and vox but, in lieu of our regular Wednesday evening rehearsal, I thought I’d knock up a quick demo to share. The song (There is No Other Friend by David Ruis) came out in the mid-90s and there isn’t a version I can find online that quite captures the way I want to approach it.

Unfortunately, it has been about nine months since I last did a recording like this and, just like you can feel rusty if you haven’t played for a while, I was definitely rusty on getting all the bits to work properly together. There was simply the practicality of how to set up the physical pieces and, once I’d got somewhere with that, getting the recording interface to work. I was using my Helix LT for the bass and guitar parts and it kept breaking connection. Eventually I figured that it worked properly if I used the USB-3 rather than the USB-2 port on top of my machine. There were still other things I didn’t figure out – like how to get a proper balance between the track I was recording and the parts I had laid down earlier – and I just had to make do.

Now I’ve got some of the dust off, the challenge is to not leave it nearly so long before I develop those skills a bit more! I expect I’m not alone in sometimes coming back to technology and discovering that there are skills that need to be built back up. As with playing music and many other things, it is easy to lose your edge.

BTW, here is the demo: