snapshot of score of Face

Face

for solo acoustic guitar

Although my first instrument was originally the guitar I always found it very difficult to write for, this recently rediscovered little ditty being about the most satisfactory effort I made in that direction. I composed it, partly from improvisation, in the early 1980s as something of a throwback to my folky, finger-picking days of a decade or so earlier. It’s heavily influenced by the late John Renbourn, a number of whose pieces I used to play back then — it could even be taken as a tribute to him, although that wasn’t the conscious intention at the time.

There’s no PDF score extract available here because the whole thing’s only three pages long, so you’ll have to make do with the snapshot on the right, and you can follow the whole score with the YouTube video below.

It’s intended to be played on a steel-strung acoustic guitar — there are a few bends in there, and anyway I like the sound. At the time I wrote it I could play it, but I’d need a good deal of practice to manage it now — so it’s yet another MIDI recording below...

...oh, and please don’t ask me why it’s called Face, which is lost in the mists of antiquity — all I can say, if you’re a musician, is that it’s nothing to do with Fmaj7, which doesn’t occur anywhere in the piece (Amaj7 does — you can see it in the snapshot — but Ac#eg# doesn’t have the same title potential).

Instrumentation

Performances / broadcasts / ‘real’ recordings

Listen to MIDI version (2:27)