I am currently giving away six works of music for free, three of the Ballads and three of the Transcriptions. High-resolution sample pages with and without tablature are available. They are 300 dpi greyscale scans of hand-written scores, black ink (and sometimes pencil) on white paper.

You can also examine many more parts of pages by creating an account on the site, which gives you access to the score browser application. For a limited time, registered users can browse all scores at high resolution, and unregistered visitors can still see the top-left quarter of every page. (The information below about score-browser access applies after the bicentenary promo ends.) The way it works is, the more music you have paid for, the more you can see of the rest of the offerings. A client that is registered but has not made a purchase can see very little this way—about 25% portions of another half-dozen pages. In all cases, paying the rental fee for a volume of the Ballads or making a credit-donation of equal amount (that is, £15) earns equal rights to browse scores not yet purchased. (Note that donations are fully redeemable as future purchase credits.) The following table summarises the browsing powers that a given purchase and/or donation will earn.

If a targeted donation is made towards a specific volume still in preparation, browsing credits will be concentrated on this volume of interest. A targeted donation of £15 or more towards any given volume entitles you to browse 100% of the completed songs in that volume, and a targeted donation of £30 or more entitles you to browse even the songs in the volume which are still works in progress. (That privilege is only granted in that case; in all other cases, browsing is confined to songs which are finished.) Targeted donations still entitle you to browse the other volumes to the extents summarised in the table above, so targeting your contribution earns you some extra browsing power for the same investment.

It is worth emphasising that all contributions are fully redeemable towards purchases of the songbooks, either immediately or at some future time (when more volumes will be available). You need not purchase the volume you target your contribution toward.

You can track progress on all volumes at the main index page, which also shows which songs of each volume are complete and hence browsable.