Andy McKee (link just above) does some pretty interesting stuff on the guitar and he obviously does what he does with a great deal of facility. But when I see something like that, I'm reminded of a classic guitarist who was playing at a restaurant where my wife and I ate a couple of years ago. He played pretty well, but I noticed that I had never heard any of the pieces he was playing before. And after he played four or five pieces, they all started sounding the same.

When he took a break, I got to talking with him. He'd taken about six months worth of lessons from a teacher in town that I knew (good teacher) and from that point on, he was self-taught. Everything he played, he'd written himself, he said with a touch of pride.

I pressed the questions a bit. Could he play, say, "Recuerdos de la Alhambra," Tarrega's "Tremolo Study?" No. Could he play "Romance de Amor," a lovely, but fairly simple piece by Anonymous, that almost everyone, classic guitarist or not, takes a shot at? No. Could he play, say, Tarrega's "Lagrima" (a piece my teacher had me playing about two months after I started)? No. How about a Fernando Sor study or two? Uh. . . .   No.

In fact, all he could play were pieces he had worked out himself. They consisted primarily of moving the three bar chords he knew reasonably well up and down the neck while he played arpeggio patterns with his right hand. Not, I would say, on anyone's very long list of "top guitarists."

So when I see someone playing stuff he fairly obviously worked out himself, I tend to wonder if he can play anything written by someone else.

Don Firth