Global guitar stars bring magic in their fingertips

Eighteen years ago, while traveling to Frankfurt, Taiwan-based musician Huang Chia-Wei came across a group of German finger-style guitarists at a musical-instrument exhibition. He was struck by the distinctive sounds made by plucking the strings directly with the fingertips, fingernails, or picks attached to fingers, which spanned a broad range of genres, including folk, jazz and blues, and intrigued by the guitarists' techniques, like finger picking, strumming and harmonics. As soon as he returned home, Huang began digging into finger-style guitar playing.

"That's when the obsession started. I knew that's the thing I wanted to do with my life," says Huang. His interest grew into a guitar club in Taiwan, which gathered and trained finger-style guitarists. He also wrote several books introducing this style and has released five studio albums since 1998.

The International Finger-Style Guitar Festival, another brainchild of Huang's, will see its sixth year in 2015. With headliners including Jacques Stotzem from Belgium, Claus Boesser Ferrari from Germany, and Americans Justin King and Trace Bundy, the festival will come to Beijing and Shanghai in July and then move on to South Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam.