I've used classics exclusively for folk music for fifty years, and believe me, I play a heck of a lot more than just chords. My accompaniments run the gamut from simple (à la Burl Ives) to complex (à la Richard Dyer-Bennet). I also finger-pick, and sometimes I just whack away at it. I don't think in terms of classic or steel-string, I just figure out what kind of accompaniment would be appropriate for the particular song and take it from there. The classic works fine for everything, with the possible exception of blues and bluegrass (not because you can't do it on a classic, which you can, but because the sound just isn't right).

Recently I've developed a bit of a hankering for the steel-string sound, and I'd like to pick up a nice li'l steel-string parlor guitar. But the classic would still be my main instrument.

Of course, I have fairly big hands. But then (li'l thread creep here), I had a guitar student once, a young woman in her early twenties who stood about 4'10". She was just little. Her hands were so small she had dimples on her knuckles, and I thought maybe she should get for a smaller guitar (she had a standard classic) and/or I'd have to figure out modified fingerings for her. But she insisted on "learning it right." Within a few of weeks she was playing all the exercises in the technique book with standard fingerings--including a first position G chord, using her 2nd, 3rd, and 4th fingers! She diligently kept her thumb behind the neck like the book said she was supposed to do and, small as her hands were, she found she could make all the reaches. She wound up able to play anything that anybody else could play. So it can be done.

Don Firth