Jazz Guitar Voice Leading: Soloing Through I’ll Be Seeing You With Guide Tones and the Wes Line
To solo with voice leading over I'll Be Seeing You, build your lines from the guide tones that connect each chord, choose your fretboard region with the Wes Line, and exploit the fact that the tune's first eight bars and second eight bars share the same voice-leading shape. This is exactly how Junewon Choi, the Berklee-trained guitarist behind VoiceLid Jazz Guitar's online jazz guitar lessons, teaches advanced players to solo through a standard: not by running scales over each chord, but by hearing the chord melody first and treating the solo as that melody in motion. The tune sits in Eb major (two flats), and one substitution unlocks the whole approach.
Why Read the Ebmaj7 as a Cm6?
The first chord is Ebmaj7, but you can treat it as Cm6 — the relative vi chord — because a Imaj7 and a vi minor-6 chord share the same essential tones and the same tonic function. Reading it as Cm6 puts your hand in a position where the next move voice-leads naturally into Fm7, then into the C7 (where an E natural and a diminished color appear), and onward. The melody of each chord is what you target: on Fm7 you land the Ab, on the dominant you resolve the guide tones a half step. You are not "choosing a scale" — you are connecting the 3rds and 7ths so the changes sing. For the full map of how guide tones behave across every chord quality, the Bridge Series guide-tone lessons lay it out clearly.
How Does the Wes Line Decide My Position?
Once you know the key, the next question is where on the neck to play — and the Wes Line answers it. In Eb (two-flat major), the Wes Line can appear in two regions, and the right one depends on the melody's register. The high Wes Line position is often too high to begin the melody, so you start lower and let the line climb. Choosing the position this way is also where sight-reading and fretboard mapping connect: the key dictates a home region, and the Wes Line tells you which one carries the sound jazz players actually use. If you want the underlying fretboard logic, that is the core of Wes' Insight.
Why Do the First and Second Eight Bars Voice-Lead the Same Way?
Here is the structural insight that makes the tune easy to memorize:
The first eight bars and the second eight bars use the same voice-leading concept — only the first two bars differ.
Bars 1–2 of the A section move Ebmaj7 → G7 → Cm → CmMaj7; the parallel spot in the second A moves through the same guide-tone descent.
From bar 3 onward both sections are identical: Fm7, C7, then the ii-V-I cadences home to Ebmaj7.
In the bridge, the Dm7b5–G7 functions just like Fm going to G7 — think "Fm to G7 through the diminished" and the line writes itself.
Seeing the form this way means you really only learn one voice-leading shape and reuse it. For a deeper case study on extracting a solo from chord melody, see Voice Leading on Complex Tunes: Getting Information from Chord Melody.
How Do I Practice This So It Sticks?
Start out of tempo. Find the line that makes the changes audible — "if I play this into that, the chord change is unmistakable" — before you ever turn on the metronome. Only once the path is clear do you add time and work out how many notes fit between each chord. Keeping the original melody in your ear the whole time is what keeps the solo connected to the song; for more on that habit, read Stop Counting Bars: How Melody and Guide Tones Navigate the Changes. To go all the way into Wes Montgomery's fretboard logic and diagonal phrasing, Wes' Insight at voicelidjazzguitar.com/jazz-icon-wes-insight is the next step.
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