Guitar Teacher History and Credentials
Don Kiritsopoulos offers professional guitar lessons in Melbourne for beginners to advanced students. Don played professionally for over twenty-five years and he is highly proficient in many styles of music (not heavy metal or modern jazz). He is particularly fond of playing blues-rock and his favourite guitarist is Gary Moore.
Don has an Honours Degree in music (B.Mus (Hons)) from Melbourne University. He is a past theory examiner with the Australian Music Examinations Board and a lecturer at a tertiary level. At Australian Catholic University he lectured in Harmony and Counterpoint. At the Melba Conservatorium of Music, now part of Victoria University, he lectured in History of Music, Harmony and Counterpoint and Guitar. In addition, Don gave guitar lessons for many years at various grammar schools including Methodist Ladies’ College, Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar and Korowa Anglican Girls’ School.
In 1983 he and Jenny Ford established Melbourne School Of Music. He now teaches guitar exclusively at Melbourne School Of Music.
The Philosophy behind our Melbourne Guitar Lessons
Don’s philosophy is not to give students what they think they want and need, just to keep them happy……in the short term. He believes his role is to guide them properly from the beginning, so that they can learn in an organised manner and advance and achieve their maximum potential. The proof that this philosophy is correct is that most of Don’s students have been with him for many years. Don says: ‘You don’t have people coming to you for that long if you don’t do the right thing by them, or if they can’t see any value in what you are giving them.’
Prospective students should note that Don does not teach guitar via tabs. In his opinion, learning to play guitar via tabs only leads eventually to realising that you have absolutely no idea what you are doing! You don’t know what note you are playing, what key you’re in, what time signature you are playing in, you have absolutely no idea what scale or mode the song you are trying to play is using, nor do you have any idea what the notes are of the chord you have just played – let alone why you played that particular chord in the first place! If you don’t believe that all these things are important you may need to think again.
‘Tabs’ is an abbreviation for tablature. Tablature is not something that has been invented in recent times. In actual fact tablature pre-dates modern notation. Several different types of tablature notation were used for the notation of lute and vihuela music throughout Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, but they were all eventually abandoned by the mid to late 1700’s to give way to the system of notation that all instruments in Western Music use today. Tablature was abandoned because musicians realised the limitations of that system. In modern times, tablature was re-introduced because many of the electric guitarists from the 1950s onwards were musically illiterate.
Reading music is not at all simple and what most beginners do not understand is that even at an elementary level, reading music requires that you understand two things – the pitch of the note and the duration of that note. Understanding how to read the pitch of the note via notation is relatively simple and takes most beginners only a matter of weeks. But understanding the duration of a note and how to execute that correctly is much more complicated and takes a lot longer. If you don’t understand duration, you can’t read music – it’s as simple as that! Tabs sweep all of this, particularly understanding the duration of the note, under the table.
One of Don’s favourite guitars….his Gibson “Gary Moore” Les Paul (2000)
Don does not teach from hand-written notes and scraps of paper. He has written a progressive method for modern guitar comprising four books where all the material is presented in a professional, printed format. In the early stages the emphasis is on developing correct technique and becoming proficient at reading music, as well as understanding the basic rudiments of music theory. The study of music theory and the history of music, and later the study of harmony, are all essential to enable students not only to read music, but also to begin to understand what they are playing. Music theory, history and harmony are therefore included in all guitar classes from the outset. The theory books used have been co-written by Don and Jenny and are published under Melbourne School Of Music.
Once students become reasonably proficient at playing and reading music, the emphasis during guitar classes shifts to the study of harmony, the exploration of the different styles of music, and then learning to work out songs and guitar solos by ear. While Don firmly believes that you need to learn to read accurately and to understand the theory behind the music, he is also fully aware that a complete musician must also develop the ability to listen to music and work some things out by ear. This is essential because sometimes there is no sheet music available and often, believe it or not, the sheet music that is available is not correct. This however, is not something you should attempt to do when you are a beginner, it is something you should work on once you are reasonably proficient.
Don has been teaching for over forty years and in that time he has had many people come to him who had been playing guitar for years but were very frustrated because they had finally realised that although they could play the usual ten riffs and a smattering of chords, they really didn’t understand what they were doing and could not progress. They came to him because they wanted to go back and do what they should have done in the beginning. The result is much more than just guitar lessons, it is a method that conveys a solid understanding of both technique and underlying theory.
