Should You Learn Licks or Transcribe Solos? What You’re Really Copying Is Time Feel
Transcribe whole solos rather than collecting licks — because what actually transfers from a great player to you is not their phrases, it's their time feel. Junewon Choi has never chased licks, and the online jazz guitar lessons at VoiceLid Jazz Guitar are built the other way around: learn a full solo, badly at first, repeatedly, and something enters your playing that no phrase library can deliver. A lick is a souvenir. A transcription is an apprenticeship.
The reason has to do with what kind of music this is. American music — jazz, blues, R&B, everything downstream of them — is organized around rhythm in a way that European classical music is not. When you copy Wes Montgomery, the notes are the least interesting thing you're taking.
What does a full transcription give you that a lick doesn't?
A lick answers "what do I play here?" A transcription answers "how does this person move through time?"
When you learn an entire solo — where the phrases start relative to the bar, where the player leaves silence, what happens at the turnaround, how the density shifts from chorus to chorus — you absorb an architecture. And you start playing with that player's rhythmic center of gravity. It's involuntary. Do it a few times and people will tell you your feel changed.
Lick practice: collects fragments, keyed to no particular tune.
Transcription: delivers phrasing, placement, dynamics, and time feel together.
Twelve-key drilling of licks: produces technical fluency with no musical address.
Whole-solo copying: builds vocabulary that already knows where it lives.
Start large before you go small. Get the shape of the whole solo before you fuss over an individual line.
Why is "just play what you hear" bad advice?
Because it's incomplete, and the incompleteness does real damage. A student once told Junewon that his private teacher kept insisting he play by ear — without ever explaining what to listen for. That's not teaching; it's a demand disguised as guidance.
Think about what you're actually using during scale-box practice. Your eyes and your fingers. Not your ears. So when a chord goes by and someone asks what you were hearing, the honest answer is nothing — you've never once been asked to hear anything. Then a teacher says "play by ear" and the student concludes he lacks talent. He doesn't. He was trained on a method that has no ear component in it, and nobody told him. If you want an honest read on where your own gaps sit, the Scorecard is built for exactly that kind of self-assessment.
What actually trains the ear, then?
The common-tone exercise — and it's the single most underrated thing in Junewon's method.
Pick one note. Hold it as the top voice while you play the chord changes of an entire tune underneath it, moving the voicings so that note stays put. It sounds almost too simple. What's happening is that you're hearing that pitch against every chord in the song, in context, while singing the melody in your head throughout.
The payoff shows up later, when you try to solo. Most players put on a backing track, start improvising, and within eight bars think where am I? They got lost because they stopped hearing the melody. The common-tone work means that note can never pull the melody out of your head again — you've already heard it in every harmonic position and it's been neutralized. Junewon describes it as putting muscle on the ear that holds the melody in place. The difference between a tune you've done this on and one you haven't is not subtle. For a companion piece on building that listening habit, see How to Transcribe So Your Ear Actually Grows.
Does the guitar make this harder than it should be?
In a specific way, yes. The guitar's movable shapes are a gift — one form slides anywhere and becomes a new chord. But precisely because it's so easy, guitarists learn shapes visually and geometrically and never encode them as sounds. Junewon heard this lamented constantly at Berklee, and Peter Bernstein has said much the same recently. The blessing becomes a curse the moment the eye takes over from the ear.
There's a related trap in what you listen to. If your playing comes out as an unbroken stream of even eighth notes, that's not a technique problem — it's a listening diet problem. The players with the most interesting rhythm are worth deliberate study: Wes for sheer rhythmic mastery, George Benson for variety inside speed, Grant Green for time feel and unexpected entrances. Copy a whole solo from any of them and your rhythm changes before your vocabulary does. For more on that connection, see You Play What You Listen To.
Where does this leave the theory?
Right where it belongs — as the description, not the destination. Junewon's own path was transcription first: Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Grant Green, Peter Bernstein, Charlie Christian, Russell Malone. The method he teaches now was extracted from those solos, the way a paper's argument gets built from its citations. Nothing in it was invented in the abstract and then imposed on the music.
So if you're deciding how to spend the next six months: pick one player you love, take one solo, and live inside it. Copy it wrong, copy it again, keep the recording on constantly. You're not collecting phrases. You're borrowing someone's sense of time until it becomes yours.
Want the method those transcriptions produced?Essential: Building Blocks is where it starts — the foundation that makes everything you hear on a record legible.
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