RICK FOSTER

Rick Foster comes from a Christian family and has enjoyed the great hymns of the Christian faith since he was young. His love for both sacred music and the guitar led to a search for solo guitar arrangements of his favorite hymns. Unable to locate such arrangements, he set forth upon a lifelong goal of creating a repertoire of sacred music for the classical guitar.
Rick began playing the Hawaiian steel guitar at age eleven and shortly thereafter took up the 6 and 12-string guitars, playing with a flat pick. At age 14 he began playing electric guitar in a surf-rock band in Southern California. About this time, he was exposed to the fingerstyle recordings of Chet Atkins and Andres Segovia, and began using a thumb pick in an attempt to play both the bass and melody notes at the same time. He taught himself to read guitar music and shortly after graduating from high school began trying to play some Sor studies from an old Segovia manuscript, still using a thumb pick since he did not realize that no picks are used in classical guitar technique. During Rick's first year of college he attended a recital by the great classical guitarist, Andres Segovia. Highly inspired, he enrolled as the first guitar major in the newly formed guitar department at Cal State College in Fullerton, California. At age 18 he began teaching guitar. During the next 20 years he made his living teaching and playing in restaurants, all the while developing the playing and arranging techniques that led to his first album of hymns. That album, Hymns for Classic Guitar, was to become the first in a series of albums that eventually resulted in enough arrangements for Rick to present a full-length concert of sacred music on the guitar.
Between 1981 and 2005 Rick and his family toured throughout the United States giving sacred concerts for churches, colleges, and guitar societies. At the debut of the Contemporary Christian Music scene Rick Foster was in the forefront as a sacred solo guitarist.