Fretboard Floater: ; Mountain Stage Guests Youtube Clips Garner Legions of Fans

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If you go What: Mountain Stage When: 7 p.m. Sunday Where: Clay Center Tickets: $15 in advance, $20 at the door FYI: The lineup for Sundays special show at the Clay Center includes Ani DeFranco, Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, Chuck Prophet, Erin McKeown and Andy McKee

Andy McKee may very well be teaching guitar and playing for small crowds if it werent for a nifty little Internet site called YouTube. But when Candy Rat Records decided to post a few videos of the chubby-fingered guy who can fingerpick a guitar with the grace of a ballet dancer, they went viral, as they say. And 78 million hits later, people who love guitar know McKee. His ever-evolving look is as fun to track as the playing he believes videos in which he shaved his head and sported a long beard were attention-getters. Now my hair is about an inch long all around, kind of like a 5 oclock shadow, he said. The YouTube hits were a surprising boost to his career. We had no idea that it could go that far, said McKee of what happened after the November 2006 postings. I started to get a lot of offers to perform and play shows. McKee makes his first visit to Mountain Stage on Sunday at a Clay Center show, as part of a swing this month that has taken him from New York to Massachusetts, and down through Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. The southern route continues next month with gigs in Tennessee, Georgia and Florida before McKee hops across the ocean for a trip through the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain and The Netherlands. Not bad for a self-taught musician. A native of Topeka, Kan., McKee was a typical teen who picked up an electric guitar at 13. He recalls playing Metallica in a school talent show. I really got into the acoustic guitar when I was 16. I saw Preston Reed play and he was doing really cool stuff, McKee recalled of the tap guitar virtuoso. I started trying to learn songs by ear off CDs. Later, I would look at books and stuff for ideas on how to get started on the technique and I started learning the more advanced stuff. Advanced, indeed: McKee first got international notice when he was named a top finalist at the National Finger Style Guitar Championships in Windfield, Kansas. Now 30, he has released five independent albums since 2001 and sold more than 50,000 copies. He played on Josh Grobans Grammy-nominated Christmas album, Noel and he received Acoustic Guitar Magazines worldwide silver medal award for fingerstyle in 2008. Hes even thinking about adding some singing to the mix. Well, maybe. Im not that great; its something Im kind of working on, McKee said. If I did start to sing, Id have to bring in the pyrotechnics to cover it. Watching McKees hands and fingers fly is part of the fun of his music. So are the guitars he favors a Michael Greenfield fanned-fret model. The frets on the guitar neck fan out from first to last, a design feature he says has better intonation. On a piano or harp, the bass strings are longer this is the same thing, he said. McKee plays original compositions and arrangements. A favorite arrangement, for example, includes a medley of 1980s pop songs. He has a computer program that will take his basic tablature notations and convert them to standard music notations, a helpful device because he sells his sheet music through his Web site. Having 78 million hits on a video Web site is one thing; filling seats at gigs is another. But McKee says hes been surprised to see crowds of several hundred show up to see him play. "Its kind of crazy. I wouldnt ever have thought an instrumental acoustic guitarist would be that interesting to people," he said.

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Fretboard Floater: ; Mountain Stage Guests Youtube Clips Garner Legions of Fans

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