THE Guitar Mastery Of Tommy Emmanuel is a matter-of-fact album title rather than an idle boast to accompany his new compilation double CD.

In a career spanning five decades, the finger-picking Australian virtuoso has turmed his hands to jazz, rock, blues and country, as can be witnessed at Harrogate Royal Hall on Tuesday, the opening night of his nine-date British solo tour.

"I've always been interested in all kinds of music and the only music I didn't listen to as a child was classical, which I later grew to love," says Tommy. "As a kid, if you love classical music, it's seen as snobbish, but it was the pop music of the day, and it took me years to leave its 'snobby' stigma behind."

The two-time Grammy nominee was born into a musical family in Muswellbrook, Australia and was taught by his mother after being given his first guitar at the age of four. "I learned by ear and I still play everything by ear," says Tommy. "I've never had any formal training and never read music, so I'm making all this musical stuff up, but I've always had a place for everything because I had good advice to keep my heart open and be receptive to all things."

By the time he was six – "I was a late bloomer," he jokes – Tommy was working as a professional musician in the family band, in such guises as The Emmanuel Quartet, The Midget Surfaries and The Trailblazers. Within four years, young Tommy had played his way across Australia.

"We had to play all sorts of things; we were the world's biggest show-offs," he recalls. "The big misconception is that I'm a BIG show-off. I'm just a show-off, but as a boy, I was the boy wonder for a while because my dad loved me to rush around the stage and play everything.

"But I'm really glad when I look back on my teens and 20s that I listened to singer-songwriters, such as Gordon Lightfoot, Carole King, James Taylor, Don McLean, and then of course Elton John, Billy Joel and Stevie Wonder, so that I wanted to be writer and didn't just want to be a guitarist. I wanted to write songs.

"I remember, when picking up my first guitar, struggling with it but my mother had a way of explaining it to me and taught me about looking for the patterns in songs."

Every song has a pattern, explains Tommy. "That is kind of how I dissected music and worked it out, and my brother Phil had this game with me of trying to work out songs first . He was older than me so he was my mentor."

Tommy and Phil went on to perform together at the Sydney Olympic Games Closing Ceremony, prompting the wider world to want to know who this mysterious Australian guitarist was. Subsequently, in 2001 Tommy released his first solo acoustic album, Only, since when he has maintained a non-stop touring schedule, playing 300 concerts a year for the past seven years.

"When I first walked on stage, it was like, 'OK, I'm at home now', and I still get that feeling that I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I'm seriously addicted to it. I'm an applause junkie," he says.

Away from the stage, Tommy has made more than 20 recordings of solos, duets, ensembles, originalsand covers, using both electric and acoustic guitar, to go with six live performance DVDs and six instructional DVDs and CDRoms, and he regularly finds time too to teach master classes while on the road.

A guitar is always by his side, just as it was in his childhood. "All the time. I would sleep with my guitar. In fact my mum used to take photos of us with our guitars in bed," reveals Tommy.

The unpredictable nature of a concert is his ultimate thrill. "I try to be in the moment all the time when I play and it just comes naturally to me, but then when I write a piece, I construct it and polish it and then it's set and I play it as I intended," he says. "Though there are songs in the set list when I purposely build in moments of improvisation, when I don't know where it's going to go and the audience don't know, so it's different every day."

Now 59, Tommy had five decades of Emmanuel recordings from which to pick tracks for his Guitar Mastery album. "That body of work goes back a long way and if people are discovering me for the first time, we wanted to give a cross-section of my music, so it was initially chosen by my manager and my Japanese record company, who are very caring about the legacy that is being put out," he says. "All the photographs were taken in Italy and I had the final say on all the tracks."

So, what would Tommy consider his legacy to be? "I'm an entertainer who plays guitar and when I go on stage I show you who I am from deep inside through my music," he says. "And the music is the bridge as I tell you stories without any words."

Tommy Emmanuel plays Harrogate Royal Hall on Tuesday, 7.30pm. Tickets: £22.50 on 01423 502116 or at harrogatetheatre.co.uk