Well, yesterday I received my new audio interface, Echo AudioFire4, and today I plugged it in…. and it sure works.  The installation process was a no-brainer, giving me confidence about the supposed good reputation this company has on their drivers.

The playback seems a bit brighter than what I’m used to with the long-defunct Alesis IO14.  But it’s just a hair, though — nothing I can’t get used to.

So I opened up a recording of one of my songs I last worked on in Logic Express — only to discover that the drum samples are missing.  It somehow didn’t survive the hard drive crash I had a couple of days ago — I think I know why, though it’s really not useful to explain here.

I have the samples backed up elsewhere, but it’s among the stacks of backup CDRs I have — it was from the days before I had hard drives to back things up to.  This was an unexpected extra step in my current project to get me back into recording after a 6-month hiatus.

Some of the plugins didn’t work, either — I need to investigate that.

Then I was jamming to some King’s X later.  And I was struck once again between how clumsy I am on my guitar.  I’ve been practicing diligently and I feel that I am in a good shape, chop-wise — but my good shape is still nowhere near I want to be.

So today felt like it was one step forward, two steps backward.  I long to be in a place where I can creatively express myself effortlessly — my equipment is all set up and seamlessly working, and I have a command on my instrument that I can pull out what I hear in my head.

But in the mean time, I just have to say what I can say with what I got.  That’s creative and still fun, too.  I just need to get over these initial mini-frustrations.

Onward!