ractice Just Running Laps? A Lesson From a Bad Soccer CoachIs Your Guitar P
If you practice scales every day and still can't play a single tune, the problem isn't your discipline — it's that you've been running laps and calling it soccer. That's the answer Junewon Choi gave in a recent VoiceLid Jazz Guitar live session when viewers asked how his free lectures relate to his full curriculum, and it's the philosophy behind his online jazz guitar lessons: drills are fitness, tunes are the game, and no one signed up for guitar to get better at warming up.
What does the bad soccer coach do?
Imagine you hire a soccer coach. He looks you over and says: "You'll need stamina for a real match — fifteen minutes each half at least. Let's start with laps." So you run laps all lesson and never touch the ball. Next week you come back: "Still not fit enough. More laps." Would you keep paying him? Of course not — you can run laps alone, for free. Yet that is exactly what scale-only, mode-memorizing guitar lessons are: paying someone to supervise your conditioning while the ball — the music — sits untouched in the corner. If your jazz education has been years of laps, nothing is wrong with you. Something was wrong with the lesson plan.
So are scales and drills useless?
No — they're fitness, and fitness matters. Junewon's own free lectures and PDFs are exactly that: base conditioning and vocabulary building, like a language learner banking words. But nobody becomes a speaker by memorizing the dictionary — reading, listening, and speaking have to develop together, which in jazz means knowing a tune's melody, understanding its chord structure, hearing the voice leading, and soloing on it a little, all at once, imperfectly. You came to swim, so you have to get in the water; you came to play soccer, so you have to touch the ball. In practice:
Fitness (a little, daily): shell voicings, triad visibility, two-octave structures — five focused minutes with a show on in the background is enough
The game (the main event): learning tunes and growing a repertoire
Diagnosis (as needed): when the game exposes a weak spot — triads you can't see, voicings you fumble — return to the specific drill for a season, like squats for weak legs
For an honest way to find those weak spots, the Scorecard is the self-check Junewon built for exactly this.
How should you go through a course, then — step by step to mastery?
The opposite: read it through like a book, more than once. Junewon's word for it is tongdok — the read-through. Don't camp on step one until it's perfect; you'd be the student memorizing the alphabet backwards to "prepare" for English. Watch the whole course loosely, learn tunes alongside it, then come back around. The second pass works like re-watching a great film: scenes you slid past suddenly connect, and details appear that were invisible before you knew the ending. Somewhere in those passes — different timing for every player — comes the click, the moment the fretboard starts explaining itself. It comes for everyone, he says, but only for those who kept moving. The archive tells a related story in why you can't follow a teacher who forgot the steps they climbed.
What's the end goal of all this practice?
Not to sound like the course — to sound like you. When a viewer confessed he could compose a solo for one song but couldn't improvise on any new tune, Junewon's answer was warm: that's a normal stage, not a failure. Composed solos are melody-writing practice; concepts learned per-chord gradually loosen into real-time choices. His teacher, Richie Hart — the Berklee-trained guitarist who studied with George Benson — pushed him toward one goal: your own sound, your own solo. That's the same goal he now sets for students. Repertoire is how you get there, one tune owned at a time; the snowball logic is laid out in why cycles and drills can't replace repertoire.
Where do you start touching the ball?
Pick one tune this weekend — melody first, then bass notes, then shells. Keep the laps to minutes and give the ball the hour. And if you want a curriculum that hands you the ball on day one instead of a decade of conditioning, Building Blocks is the entry point: songs, voices, and the fretboard, in playing order.
About the Author
Junewon Choi is a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist and the founder of VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, an online education platform teaching jazz harmony and improvisation through the Functional Diagonal Approach (FDA) — a chord-first method built on voice-leading rather than scale boxes.
Wes' Insight — Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic, in lesson form
Fundamental 1: Wes Diagonal System — the FDA from the ground up