es a Jazz Guitarist Actually Do All Day?Wes Montgomery Said He Never Practiced. So What Do
Wes Montgomery once answered the question "how do you practice?" with something like: Practice? No. I play. I play the guitar, I play songs. It's a famous line, and people quote it as permission. It isn't. For Wes it was simply true, and the reason it was true is the whole lesson. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, the online jazz guitar lessons I teach are built on what Wes's ear did for free — and on the two things the rest of us have to do on purpose. I'm Junewon Choi, a Berklee-trained jazz guitarist, and a viewer asked me last week what my own practice routine looks like. This is the honest version.
Why could Wes get away with it?
Because he had ears most of us will never have, and he grew up inside music. He could sit in front of an orchestra and pull out exactly the one line he wanted to hear. He couldn't read, and didn't need to. When Wes picked up the guitar, he was reproducing something he'd already heard completely — so from his side of it, that wasn't practice. It was playing. If you want to understand what "hearing the whole thing first" produces on the fretboard, Wes' Insight shows the logic that his ear arrived at without a method. For those of us who weren't born into it, the same destination has a road. Two lanes, actually.
Lane one: transcription — still, always
I studied with Richie Hart for seven or eight years, and the largest single part of his method was transcription. Not licks. Whole solos, note by note, in the position the player used. To this day, when I feel like I should be practicing something, the first thought that arrives is: transcribe. This week, driving back from my in-laws', I put Wes's The Incredible Jazz Guitar on and Gone with the Wind came up — the first tune I ever transcribed completely, single line through octaves through chord solo. I could sing every chorus. And I decided, in the car, that I'm going to redo it. Not because I forgot it. Because I did it too early, and now I'll hear things I couldn't hear then. Old transcriptions are not finished; they're waiting for your ears to catch up.
Lane two: learn every tune in layers
The other half is the same on every song, and I still do it on every song. It's the How to Learn Tunes stack:
Melody alone, until you can sing it
Bass note plus melody
Tenor line plus melody, then alto line plus melody — voice-led, one note moving at a time
Chord melody, then a more advanced harmonization of the same melody
A solo built by following those voicings through the changes
Then one more check that never ends: am I actually making the right sound, in the right place, in time? That's not a beginner question. It's the question.
What about when everything goes wrong on stage?
Someone asked what to do when a string breaks mid-tune. You keep the melody alive. A solo can be bent around a missing string — play it more rhythmically, more melodically, use what you have. But the melody has to survive, because it's the thing the audience and the band are holding onto. That answer is the routine in miniature. Everything I practice is in service of keeping the melody audible, whatever else happens.
So what's the routine, in one sentence?
Transcribe whole solos, and learn whole tunes in layers — forever, on every tune, with no graduation. That's it. There's no day I stop needing it. Wes didn't need it because his ear had already done both. For the mindset behind "play, don't practice" — and why it isn't the same as "don't work" — read Stop 'Practicing' and Start 'Playing': The Most Important Mindset Shift. And for what Wes's and George Benson's ears actually did, see The 'Big Ears' Secret: How Jazz Guitar Masters Really Learned to Play.
Wes played. We transcribe until playing is all that's left.
If you want an honest picture of where your own two lanes stand — what you can already hear, and which layer of the tune you're stuck on — start with the Scorecard at https://www.voicelidjazzguitar.com/scorecard.
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