About The Daily Frail
The Old | The New | About Patrick Costello | About Frailing Banjo
The Old:
The Daily Frail sprang from the imagination of Patrick Costello as an experimental podcast in 2006. Over the past five years the project has produced hundreds of short audio and video banjo workshops and lessons that have been used by ten of thousands of banjo players around the world
In the original series of workshops there was effort by Patrick to catalog The Daily Frail. Workshops were created on the fly and posted to his personal weblog using services like The Internet Archive and YouTube to host the media.
The Old | The New | About Patrick Costello | About Frailing Banjo
The New:
The latest incarnation of The Daily Frail will feature a new workshop posted each business day. Workshops will only be online for 24 hours, with a monthly archive available on DVD from Pik-Ware Publishing.
The Old | The New | About Patrick Costello | About Frailing Banjo
About Patrick Costello:
Patrick Costello was one of the first - if not the first - traditional musicians to use the Internet as an educational platform. His experiments in multimedia and open-source publishing have introduced tens of thousands of people around the world to the simple joy of homemade music.
Patrick has been dealing with major hearing loss for most of his life. By 2007 he was almost completely deaf, but through sheer force of will he managed to continue playing and teaching – often playing by feel when he could not hear his instrument. In 2009 he had a bone-anchored hearing aid installed at Johns Hopkins. The surgery and the device have given him some of his hearing back. Patrick hasused his experiences with hearing loss to help him work with other handicapped musicians.
At Camp Adventure in Kansas
Patrick is the author of The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo, A Book of Five Strings, The Outlaws and Scalawags Songbook, This is Not A Banjo, Songs For Sunday and The How and the Tao of Folk Guitar. He currently lives in Manassas, Virginia with his beautiful wife, Amy.
Patrick at Brick Kiln in Crsifield, MD
The Old | The New | About Patrick Costello | About Frailing Banjo
Frailing Banjo
A folk instrument like the five-string banjo can be played in an infinite variety of ways, but The Daily Frail focuses on a technique called frailing.
Frailing is a powerful technique for playing a mix of rhythm and melody on the banjo. Frailing is easy to learn and perfect for playing and singing. Frailing banjo is a downpicking technique. We strike down on the banjo strings with the back of our fingernail and pluck the 5th string with our thumb to create melody and rhythm.
The basics of frailing banjo can be shared in the space of an afternoon, creating wonderful opportunities for group singing and fellowship.
For more extensive frailing instructions check out The How and the Tao of Old Time Banjo by Patrick Costello.
The Old | The New | About Patrick Costello | About Frailing Banjo