Ever since he started teaching banjo and guitar to earn a little extra money in college, Avram Siegel has limited his teaching practice to bluegrass. “Bluegrass is so specific that you can learn a lot about musicianship by studying it,” he says. “It’s almost like classical music in that way.” Siegel currently plays guitar and banjo in the Kathy Kallick Band and banjo in the traditional bluegrass band True Blue. Teaching out of his home in Berkeley, California, Siegel focuses on the finer points of playing in his private lessons and gives his students a chance to put their skills to the test in group jam classes.

Sweat the Small Stuff
Siegel finds that the availability of guitar and banjo tab books as well as Internet transcriptions means that many beginners know lots of songs before they’ve actually nailed down the basic techniques they need to sound good. “At some point,” he says, “they need to learn how to play the stuff they know better—with better rhythm, technique, tone, and timing.” One of his students joked that in a lesson with Siegel you can spend an entire hour working on the attack of one note. “Paying attention to specific details when you’re practicing is a really effective way to approach the instrument,” says Siegel.
Much of his approach is rooted in classical guitar technique, which he studied as a music major at Humboldt University, because, he says, “of course, they didn’t have banjo instruction.” He transferred the concepts first to banjo and then to flatpicked guitar. Two classical techniques he regularly includes in his lessons are maximizing volume through string displacement (“You get tone out of a stringed instrument by displacing the string toward the instrument,” he says, rather than picking across a string) and breaking down the stroke into the approach and type of stroke (rest or free). “So much is about having your hand ready to play the next note,” he says. “That’s an overriding, universal concept.”
When it comes to teaching guitar, Siegel places a strong emphasis on rhythm playing, the traditional role of the bluegrass guitarist. “Everyone focuses on the boom-chuck,” Siegel’s bandmate Ed Neff once said, “but Avram taught me that it’s the chuck-boom that’s really important.” This slightly different approach helps students link their strums to the next bass note, physically and mentally anticipating that note, which improves their timing and helps them achieve the groove that is so crucial to bluegrass rhythm. Siegel uses metaphors to help his students master the mechanics of playing. “Think of your arm as the piston driving the rhythm,” he’ll say. Or, “Imagine you’re hammering a nail.”

Putting It Together
While Siegel excels at improving his students’ understanding of bluegrass technique one-on-one, his jam classes allow them to experience firsthand why a particular technique or rhythm works. The jam classes are a great way for students to put what they’re learning into practice. “I have one student,” he says, “who had been taking lessons from me for quite a long time, who made the comment, ‘Oh, now I know what all that stuff is for.’”
The main value of the class is providing context. “You learn a lot from watching what other people go through—seeing how what you’re doing relates to the other things that are happening,” Siegel explains. “When you’re playing rhythm to songs by yourself, it’s a little bit of a mental exercise and not a practical exercise. But in the class, all of these little details start making a lot more sense--for instance, what you do when you’re not taking a solo.”
Siegel began teaching these bluegrass jam classes in the fall of 2001. “I’d had so many students who had good technique, knew a lot of songs, and were as good as people I would see out in the community jamming,” he recalls, “but they wouldn’t get out and play with people.” Siegel invited them into his living room in a group: one bass player, two guitarists, two fiddlers, two mandolinists, two Dobro players, and two banjo players. He received so much interest that he added two more classes for the next session and has been offering them ever since.