As I posted a few weeks ago, we have been experimenting with teaching banjo & guitar by podcast.

So far the podcast lesson project has generated a lot of excitement. Thousands of people are subscribing to the XML feeds. People are buying banjos (no joke: in the lessons and enough traffic is coming in to melt down our server. It's safe to say that we're on to something.

The only downside is that handling the bandwidth is getting to be expensive.

I am a big believer in the folk process. When I was a kid the cool old dudes I met were willing to share with me for nothing more in return than my promise to do the same for somebody else. More than twenty years later I'm still doing my best to keep that promise.

When I put my first book out on the web under a Creative Commons license people told me that giving the book away would ruin sales. Dear Old Dad went along with me on the idea, but he wasn't exactly optimistic about the outcome.

He changed his mind the next day when orders for the book took a sudden upswing that hasn't slowed down yet.

I know that it goes against a lot of conventional marketing ideas, but the folk process works. Making the book available online introduced it to thousands of people who might never have gotten around to looking for a book about playing the five-string banjo. We literally created an entirely new market for ourselves - and we kept the promise to share with anybody who wanted to learn.

The one thing I've learned from all of this is that only way you can get anything out of folk music is to give it away.

With that in mind the challenge of finding a way to keep the lesson series going while maintaining free access was momentarily daunting.

The keyword here is "momentarily". The conversation here at the office went something like this:

"So what do we do?" "I don't know. Sell advertising like we used to do on the radio?" "Cool!"

We're going to go about this using a marketing angle I jokingly called "folk process marketing". Our sponsors get exposure to new customers who want their products and we end up with the resources to keep bringing you free music lessons.

In order to pull something like this off Dear Old Dad and I have to change the way we've been operating. Very soon we will be moving to a new server and a new web site. We will also be going to a monthly lesson schedule. These changes are necessary to give us the time and the bandwidth to introduce new workshops. In addition to banjo and guitar we will be presenting workshops on harmonica, tenor banjo and a bunch of other stuff. Shoot, we're even talking to an old friend who happens to be a genuine singing cowboy about doing a series on yodeling!

What won't change is our commitment to free access. Each workshop will be released under a Creative Commons license and our "students" will be encouraged to share the workshops with other people. This is good in terms of the folk process, but it's also good for our advertisers.

There is a lot more in the works but I want to wait until we're closer to the launch date to give you more details. Until then, keep an eye on www.howandtao.com as we get ready to upload the new web site.

If you would like information on sponsoring our podcast lessons contact

The first guitar workshop can be accessed at

There are four banjo lessons available right now:

Lesson 1

Lesson 2

Lesson 3

Lesson 4