Why Drilling Scales in 12 Keys Won’t Make You a Jazz Player — Build Repertoire Instead
If you've practiced voicings and scales in all twelve keys for months and still can't sit in on a tune, here's the uncomfortable answer: drills only gather ingredients — they never cook the meal. You can own every scale shape and still have nothing you can confidently call up at a jam. The thing that actually makes you a player is repertoire: whole tunes learned deeply enough that you can state the melody, hold the form through a solo, and comp behind someone else. That is the conviction behind VoiceLid Jazz Guitar and the online jazz guitar lessons of its founder, Berklee-trained guitarist Junewon Choi — practice should produce songs you can play, not just material you can recite.
Why aren't twelve-key drills enough?
Running voicings and licks through all twelve keys is real work, but it's fragmentary. Picture a kitchen stocked with beef, shrimp, pasta, tomato sauce, and buckwheat noodles — every ingredient you could want, and no meal. You haven't decided what to make, so nothing gets simmered, seasoned, or served. Drills are the shopping trip. A tune is the dish. Both matter, but if you only ever shop, you never eat. The deeper problem is that most of what those drills cover lives inside just four parent scales — major, harmonic minor, melodic minor, and harmonic major — so years of scale-block study often re-cover the same ground without ever turning into music.
What does "building repertoire" actually mean?
It means you can do three things on a given tune:
Play its melody accurately, in more than one position.
Hold the form through your solo without getting lost.
Comp cleanly behind another player when your solo ends.
Hit those three and you can genuinely jam a tune. A classical pianist's career is measured this way — by the pieces they've performed and can perform again — and jazz is no different: as you grow, the number of tunes you can actually play should grow with you. If a teacher only ever assigns technical studies and never gets you playing songs, it's worth reconsidering. For an honest way to see where you stand, start with the Scorecard. For a closely related take, read Stop Just 'Running': Why Cycles Don't Make You a Player.
How does one tune turn into momentum?
Think of a snowball. The hardest part isn't rolling it — it's packing that first dense core by hand. Learn one tune all the way through, melody to comping, and you've made the core. The second tune packs faster; the third faster still, because understanding compounds with every song. This is also why the mindset shift from "practicing" to "playing" matters so much — see Stop 'Practicing' and Start 'Playing'. The goal is to get out of your private practice zone and into playing with people as quickly as you reasonably can, because that's where music gets richer and where the habit actually sustains itself.
Why does this matter beyond the practice room?
There's a human reason too. Junewon described showing up to a recent broadcast exhausted — sick, drained from a week of work and a gig the night before — and feeling himself come back to life the moment he was playing and talking with people again. Music done in connection with others revives you in a way solitary drilling never does. Repertoire is what lets you join that room. You build it one tune at a time, and each one is yours to keep.
Where should I start?
Pick one tune this weekend and commit to owning it — melody first, then form, then comping. If you want a structured foundation to build that first solid snowball on, Essential: Building Blocks is the entry point.
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