Mark Easley is probably one of the most unlikely candidates to become a music video star.

But with a webcam and his guitar, that’s just what this Morrisville resident has become.

Easley has been posting instructional guitar videos recorded in his home office on the free site YouTube for about a year, garnering nearly 1 million views and more than 1,300 subscribers.

After working as the vice president of marketing for a semiconductor company in Silicon Valley, Easley retired and moved to Morrisville with his wife Maria and son Mark Jr., a senior at Cary Academy.

“When I first came to North Carolina I set up a little music studio upstairs,” Easley said.

He recorded a couple music albums, both cover songs and originals, before discovering YouTube, where millions of people worldwide have joined and posted videos of their own, from the informative to inane.

“A year ago I thought what the heck, I’ll try it,” Easley said. He posted his first video, a guitar lesson for Eric Clapton’s song “Tears in Heaven.” A week later, the video had more than 10,000 views.

He has since posted 92 videos, mostly songs by his favorite artists — John Denver, the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel among others.

“It just took off like crazy,” he said. “There are so many people up here [on YouTube]. The first day I put up a John Denver song a whole group of people came in. Then next week I put up a U2 song and boom, all these U2 fans come in.”

Easley receives requests for songs, as well as questions from viewers on how he records his videos. “I don’t use any fancy software,” he said. “About the only thing I had to buy was the webcam.”

Easley uses Windows Movie Maker, a video editing program standard on any PC with Windows, and Audacity, a free and easy-to-use audio editing program, to put his videos together before uploading them to YouTube.

Easley records two or three videos at a time and said he tries to post at least one a week, stockpiling the rest.

“I’m having a lot of fun figuring out this technology,” he said. “There are lots of Web sites out there that make it interesting.”

Easley and some friends he met through the Internet have even figured out how to hack YouTube’s encoder to post stereo-quality audio to the site.

He’s met thousands of people on YouTube and has even received gifts from as far away as Finland from viewers thanking him for the service he provides.

“It’s just crazy,” Easley said. “This was definitely not in my plan for retirement.”