RAISING THE TONE
Over the past five years, I’ve begun playing more and more fingerstyle acoustic and, with no special goal in mind, I gradually built up a dozen finished pieces that I was pretty happy with. Eventually, I realised that I easily had enough for a long EP, maybe an album, but I wondered if anyone would really want to hear instrumental songs I’d written in our kitchen at home after the family had gone to bed. The thought merited a kind of mental Gallic shrug, but not much more.
But a watershed moment happened when I interviewed fingerstyle master Gordon Giltrap a few months back. Learning one of Gordon’s pieces note-for-note from tab in in the