Jon Phipps MA
Guitar, Bass, Theory
1 hour - $60 / 45 minutes - $45
30 minutes - $35
FREE - 10/15 Minute Intro Lesson
Languages: English
Superior rating
ABOUT
I am a musician first and foremost, with a background in metal, jazz, and classical music. Over the past decade since my graduation from Essex University, I have worked as a composer, tutor, and session performer, in addition to occupying roles as a transcriber, producer and virtual orchestrator.
For several years leading on from my mid-teens, I sang and played guitar in my own progressive metal band, incorporating both traditional and more extreme styles of singing and shredding into our original music, drawing influence from artists which included Opeth, Emperor, and Meshuggah. I have also played guitar in other UK-based metal and rock bands such as Korvus, The Kuru Smile, and the Hungarian band Sectioned. In addition to this, I played double bass for a Balkan folk ensemble called Daniel Merrill and The Flowers of Evil.
Whilst studying music for five years at university, my focus was split between metal and jazz guitar performance and improvisation, as well as avant-garde classical composition. Coming into classical music from a diverse musical background, I wrote a lot of unconventional and challenging pieces for various ensembles that explored polytonality, serialism, and rhythmic complexity, drawing inspiration from Olivier Messiaen, Béla Bartók, and Frank Zappa.
During this period, I sang in both the university and chamber choirs (tenor and baritone), which gave me a lot of experience of sight-singing, performing in different languages (including Latin, French, and Hebrew), and exposed me to a range of fantastic classical repertoire, spanning from Renaissance to Contemporary.
Towards the end of my time in academia, I worked with the British composer David Fanshawe, digitally transcribing his handwritten manuscripts into the Sibelius software so that they could be republished - this made the pieces more accessible for a modern audience, and taught me a lot about orchestration, notation, and arrangement.
These various roles have led me to my current self-employed occupation as a virtual orchestrator for metal bands on the international scene, enabling artists to add classical elements to their sound through my implementation of virtual instruments and advanced midi controllers within a digital audio software environment.
Bands whose albums I have contributed to in this capacity include Moonspell (Portugal), Amorphis (Finland), Angra (Brazil), and Hatesphere (Denmark), in collaboration with top metal producers, such as Jens Bogren, Tue Madsen, and Brett Caldas-Lima. You can see and hear my diverse portfolio of work as a professional musician at orchestralmetal.com
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE
Master of Arts in music from The University of Essex, 2009 (Merit)
Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) in music from The University of Essex, 2007 (2:1)
A Level Music Performance: Grade 8 Electric Guitar (Registry of Guitar Tutors), Thames Valley University, 2004 (Merit)
A Level Music from Northgate Sixth Form, 2004 (B)
A Level Psychology from Northgate Sixth Form, 2004 (B)
A Level Physics from Northgate Sixth Form, 2004 (C)
10 GCSEs, including English, Maths, and Science, 2002 (A*-B)
I have many years of experience teaching one-to-one private music lessons (guitar, bass, drums, and theory) in both Ipswich and Colchester, in addition to leading and facilitating group music workshops for Supastars Academy.
Through Supastars Academy, my team delivered rock music workshops for both primary and secondary school children at weekends, operating out of various community centres around Colchester. We also hosted workshops at Clacton Coastal Academy as an after school club for pupils from local schools.
TEACHING APPROACH
When I first meet a new student, I start be establishing what it is that they want to achieve from having music lessons. I then use this information to structure the lessons going forward, providing technical exercises and demonstrating the application of theoretical concepts within the framework of what it is that they want to learn, with the intention of developing the student's practical vocabulary and technical understanding of what they're playing.
Often a new student comes to me with their own mixture of playing habits - I respond to this by making a point of addressing any unhelpful and efficiency-diminishing habits early on in the sessions, with a mind to replace those habits with ones that facilitate the growth of their skills, as well as the reinforcement of more effective technique.
I believe that it is important for the student to have clear goals to work towards in the lessons, and in addition to this, I think that the measurement of progress towards those aspirations makes the realisation of them much more plausible and rewarding, for both the student and myself.
REVIEWS
“Amazing! I use Jon Phipps’s tutoring service. Jon is a very natural and highly knowledgeable tutor, who has no limits to his musical ability. When I met Jon at the end of last year, my goal was to have passed FLCM guitar performance exams (FLCM = Masters level, with The Registry of Guitar Tutors) by early 2019. To find a tutor, who not only obtains the knowledge, but who can also teach at this level is very rare. You honestly wont find a more highly-skilled and humble music tutor. Trust me - I have met and know many of them. Great tutor, and also an all round great person!”
“Jon is both a highly-skilled and knowledgeable musician. What sets him apart from others in the musical world, however, is the ease with which he imparts his knowledge and abilities to anyone lucky enough to be his student. I came to him as a self-taught guitarist, and he worked diligently and compassionately to help me overcome the blocks I had in my playing. Not only that, but he also taught me the fundamentals of theory along the way, which has worked wonders for my understanding of music. I cannot rate him highly enough.”