A lot of things are easy to do passably, but difficult to do well. I think the autoharp is especially easy to play on a basic level, but moderately challenging to play really well.

I mean, you just push a button to make a chord, which you can easily strum. Many good players wear fingerpicks, and if you intend to pinpoint a single string for each stroke, there are sure a lot of strings to sort through, most of which are muted at any given time. Of course, if you hit a few adjacent strings with each stroke, you'll probably hit upon one or two strings that are on the current chord, and it'll sound OK.

We can add John Sebastian to the list of accomplished autoharp players ~ I think. He's certainly been photographed with an autoharp often enough, although all the film and video I've seen of him as a solo act featured the guitar. If he played much autoharp with his band The Lovin' Spoonful, not much is very audible in the mix.

Then there's actress Catherine O'Hara, who learned the instrument from scratch for her role in A Mighty Wind and gave a good accounting of herself. Very nice job on the catheter song...