Why Does a Jazz Guitar Teacher With No University Post Still Livestream Every Sunday Night?
There was never a university faculty position behind any of this, and for a long stretch there was barely an audience at all — some Sunday nights just three or five viewers, sometimes thirty minutes with nobody watching, just playing and talking to an empty chat window. The stream kept happening anyway, every week, because the point was never a title. It was making sure the information didn't disappear, and reached whoever needed it, whether that was three people or three thousand. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, online jazz guitar lessons with Junewon Choi grew directly out of that same weekly habit.
Why Not Just Teach at a University in Korea?
It was a real option that was deliberately passed on. The genre being taught, and the goal behind teaching it, didn't line up with what students entering a typical Korean music program were usually looking for. Most of the people who actually show up to a Sunday-night jazz guitar livestream aren't students at all — they're closer in age to the teacher, already working a different job, playing guitar because they love it rather than because it's their major. That mismatch made a university post the wrong shape for what was actually being built.
What Was It Like at the Start?
Small, for a long time. Before the audience grew to today's size, sessions ran with a handful of viewers, and on some nights, none. There was no guaranteed payoff for showing up week after week to an empty room — just a decision to keep doing it regardless of whether anyone was there to see it.
What Keeps Someone Doing This for Free, Every Week?
One specific kind of comment kept it going more than anything else: people saying the guitar had become fun again. Not that they'd memorized more material, or drilled more scales — that they'd stopped hating an instrument they used to love, once they were told they didn't have to memorize everything before they were allowed to actually play music.
What Does "Passing It On" Actually Mean Without a Faculty Position?
Without a classroom of assigned students, the idea of raising the next generation had to mean something else entirely:
It isn't about a formal lineage running through a department or a degree.
It's the person watching, right now, actually finishing what they came to the guitar wanting to do.
Every viewer who gets there becomes the actual outcome the whole project was built for — not a byproduct of it.
The teaching only "worked" the moment someone else's dream got closer, not when a curriculum got finished.
If any of this resonates and you're wondering where to actually start, Building Blocks is the same entry point built for those first handful of Sunday-night viewers — it hasn't changed just because the audience has grown.
What Changed to Make This Possible?
What's different now is access. A single person, working from home with tools that used to require an institution behind them, can produce something at a level that once needed a studio, a label, or a faculty position to reach an audience at all. That shift is what made a weekly livestream a viable way to teach in the first place, instead of a hobby squeezed in around a university job.
This same idea — that showing up and doing the work matters more than any credential ever could — is what's behind Wes Montgomery Said He Never Practiced. And it's also why private lessons and a structured curriculum end up teaching the exact same path — the coaching differs, the content doesn't.
The best way to see if you're one of the players this was actually built for is to check where you honestly stand right now — the Scorecard is a five-minute look at your own progress, no livestream required.
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