About Tassos Lambrou

Tassos Lambrou is a bouzouki player and teacher based in Sydney, Australia. He has been teaching the instrument for over twenty years, and Bouzouki Odyssey is his online course: a growing library of Greek songs, each one broken down into its melody, its chords and its harmonies.

Plenty of people come to the bouzouki with a song already in their head. It is usually one they grew up hearing, at home or at a family table or in the car. The problem is rarely motivation. It is that the song exists as a feeling rather than as something you can sit down and work through.

How he teaches

The approach behind Bouzouki Odyssey is to start from the songs themselves rather than from exercises. Each song in the library is taken apart into three layers: the melody you can already hum, the chords underneath it, then the harmony line that sits alongside. Learn all three and you are playing the song as it is actually played, not an outline of it.

That matters more on the bouzouki than on some other instruments. A lot of Greek music is carried by two players doing different things at once. Learning only the tune leaves you with half of it, which is why so many self-taught players feel stuck at the point where the recording sounds full and their version does not.

Every learner arrives differently

Some people read tabs. Some read sheet music. Some have never read anything in their life and work entirely by ear, which is how a great deal of this music was passed on in the first place. None of those is the wrong way in. The course asks how you prefer to learn when you join, because the answer changes what is useful to put in front of you.

Feedback on your own playing

Learning an instrument alone has one obvious gap: nobody tells you what you are doing wrong. When you are ready, you can record yourself playing and send it straight to Tassos. He listens back and sends you notes on it. That is the part a video on its own cannot do.

Where to hear him play

The clearest sense of what Tassos sounds like comes from watching him play. He posts regularly, including the two recordings on the waitlist page, "Mes tou Aigiou" and "Thalassaki Mou", both filmed on Lemnos in August 2026.

• YouTube
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I first started learning with Tasso over 20 years ago. The sneak peek I have seen of Tasso's new online resource will allow me to pick up where I left off with Tasso all those years ago.

Harito K., Sydney