Ripplin’ Waters first full weekend of performing in a looonnng time (too long to mention) is now behind us. While there were a few, um, unexpected twists and turns to our arrangements, overall it was like we had never stopped playing.

OK, maybe that’s going a little too far. The guitar may not have been as smooth, and definitely not as fast, as it used to be, and our voices were a little uncertain at times, but for those who hadn’t heard us in eons (which was just about everybody), everything was great! We received a fantastic response and renewed many old friendships.

Sylvia, as usual, was singing beautifully.  They loved the handful of banjo tunes we played, even if some of it was a bit ragged. Occasionally we stepped on each others’ solos and backups, but we didn’t let it throw us off too much.

We did stack the deck a little bit by sticking to the portion of our repertoire that we’d had a chance to practice enough to feel confident that we’d remember how to play it (senior musical moments and all). That means that there really wasn’t anything new, in fact it limited us mainly to material we had hard-wired in our brains for the last twenty or thirty years.

We’ll be (re-)adding more new (old) material until we have a solid base of “together” music to perform. Then, we’ll start working on brand new songs … at least new to our collection. This is likely to be a slow process, since we have always been careful not to add things so quickly that we forget them even quicker. (Did that make sense?)

Further complicating things is the loss, a few years ago, of our beloved drummer, Mr. Chips (Roland TR-707 Drum Machine). 🙁 Mr. Chips met an untimely demise at the hands of our somewhat feral cat, Sher Khan.

While our new drummer, Alex (Alesis Drum Machine) is a very competent accompanist, and actually has a much better sounding drum set, he started out with a more limited skill set. Some of the beats we used to play were completely foreign to Alex. (He didn’t even know how to play a waltz  when he “joined” the band!)

He’s slowly learning new rhythms to match our songs, but his style occasionally makes changes to our arrangements that we weren’t anticipating. Not that that’s always a bad thing. We’ll be teaching him as we go, so soon we’ll be just as fond of Alex and we were of Mr. Chips.

Back in the late 1990’s to early 2000’s we played every weekend at the Fawnskin Moose Lodge for about 4 years, and it almost felt like we had never left. These days, of course, the economic climate is different, so we won’t be playing every weekend.

However, we will be performing on the first Friday and Saturday of each month, at least through December. Maybe longer, depending on how much snow we get, and how it affects the weekend turnout.

– Brian Edmundson – Ripplin’ Waters

p.s. – One of our earliest regular gigs was also at the Moose Lodge … in Sugarloaf!  Back in the late 1970’s the Moose was located in Sugarloaf instead of Fawnskin, and we played there for several months with our original bass player, Rod Cooper.

Alright, I really am rambling now …  Stay In Tune