I don't get to play as much as I'd like. Practice at home, I mean. It takes time spent practicing your craft to keep your skills up, and even more to actually improve. My situation kinda sucks because the only time I would get to play is at home in the evenings, after the kids have gone to bed. And of course I can't play the piano or sax after the kids are in bed. I might be able to get away with the flute.
Yeah, I could set up my keyboards and use the headphones. I do that sometimes. But it's still not the same as just sitting and communing with the piano for hours and hours like in the old days. And I've got 88 plastic keys, but it's still not the same as sitting at a real piano.
Something that kinda makes up for that, however, is that I've been doing a bit of arranging for the church band, and that's been both fun and pretty fulfilling. We have a guy who plays violin and a girl who plays flute, so when we do songs that have notable lead lines and/or hook lines, they play them. This past Sunday, we did a song that has an orchestral break, and I wrote up parts for the flute and violin, to play it, and I backed it up on the keyboards. I used the trick where you have the flute and violin in harmony, with the flute underneath, and it sounds really full because of how their timbres compliment each other.
Meanwhile I was playing a basic piano patch for most of the song, but went to double voice at the break (piano+strings) to full it up a bit, and it sounded really sweet. Someone actually commented afterwards about how well we synched up with the prerecorded track; it added a lot and made it sound really full. No tricks here, folks, we played all that live.