Simon Farintosh: How One Guitarist Bridges Two Worlds

There is a moment in every musician's development when they realize the categories they were trained inside are far smaller than the music itself. For some players, that moment arrives like a crisis. For others, it arrives like an invitation. Simon Farintosh, featured in Vol. 01 No. 03 of MusiCurate, is a guitarist who has leaned into that invitation with both hands, building a career that refuses to stay inside any single box.

The Classical Foundation

Farintosh's training is rooted in the classical tradition, and that foundation is audible in everything he does. Classical training does specific things to a musician. It builds a relationship with the instrument that is structural and intimate at the same time, an understanding of how the guitar's voice works across registers, how tone is shaped by touch, how phrasing carries meaning. That kind of knowledge does not disappear when you step outside the concert hall. It travels with you. For Farintosh, the classical foundation is not a constraint but a resource, a set of tools that remains available and useful regardless of the stylistic territory he is exploring at any given moment. As covered in Vol. 01 No. 03, his ability to move fluidly across genres is not accidental; it is the result of deep preparation meeting genuine curiosity.

Crossing Stylistic Lines

What does it actually mean to be a guitarist who works across styles? For many musicians, it means a kind of surface-level code-switching, adapting the clothing of one style while the underlying musical vocabulary stays constant. Farintosh goes further than that. The ability to genuinely inhabit different musical worlds requires a willingness to be a student again, to approach unfamiliar idioms with the same seriousness and humility that you brought to your earliest classical lessons. This is harder than it sounds. The ego investment in being competent is real, and stepping into unfamiliar stylistic territory means accepting a period of not-quite-knowing. The musicians who are willing to do that consistently are the ones who continue to grow long after their formal training ends.

The Guitar as a Meeting Place

One of the things that makes the guitar such a remarkable instrument is its capacity to be a meeting place for different traditions. Nearly every musical culture in the world has developed some relationship with plucked string instruments, and the modern guitar sits at a crossroads of those histories. A guitarist like Farintosh, willing to explore that crossroads honestly, becomes a kind of living argument for the instrument's universality. This is not about eclecticism for its own sake. It is about recognizing that the guitar's voice is large enough to carry many kinds of human expression, and that limiting it artificially serves no one, least of all the music. The best guitarists have always understood this, even if they expressed it differently in different eras.

What This Means for Students and Listeners

For students watching a career like Farintosh's, the practical lesson is significant. Technical mastery matters enormously, but it is not the whole picture. The question of what you do with your mastery, which directions you choose to grow in, which traditions you engage with respectfully, is equally important and possibly more interesting. For listeners, a guitarist who spans worlds offers something that a specialist, however brilliant, cannot always provide: the sense that the music you love is in conversation with other music, that it is alive and connected rather than preserved behind glass. That sense of aliveness is one of the things MusiCurate consistently seeks out in the artists it profiles.

Simon Farintosh's story is a reminder that the most interesting musical paths are often the ones that do not follow straight lines. His work across styles is a model of curiosity meeting craft, and the result is music that keeps opening up the longer you listen.

Listen

Hear him bridge worlds on the eight-string guitar with his own composition, Approaching Storm, from his Seascapes EP.

The full feature on Simon Farintosh is in Vol. 01 No. 03 of MusiCurate, available as a single issue. If you want to follow artists like him, and the broader world of classical and crossover guitar, a subscription puts that conversation in your hands six times a year: musicurate.com/products/magazine-subscription.