an’t You Follow Your Jazz Guitar Teacher? They Forgot the Steps They ClimbedWhy C
Because experts forget their own staircase. When learning jazz guitar feels impossible halfway through a course, the usual cause isn't your talent — it's missing steps: the small, unglamorous moves your teacher internalized decades ago and no longer notices they make. This is the expert's blind spot, and it quietly ruins more jazz education than bad information ever has. At VoiceLid Jazz Guitar, Junewon Choi rebuilt his entire approach to online jazz guitar lessons around this exact discovery — and the story of how is worth your weekend.
How does a good teacher skip steps without noticing?
By teaching the way they learned. Junewon's first jazz blues course did what his own training did: cover the essential voicings, then jump straight into transcriptions of the masters — because that's how he had absorbed the language, the way Wes Montgomery and George Benson absorbed it, by ear, in giant gulps. Then the reviews came in. Students loved the material and still got lost. Reading their feedback, he saw it: between "here are the voicings" and "here's a master's solo" lived a whole flight of stairs he had climbed so long ago he'd forgotten it existed. The course wasn't wrong. It was missing its middle.
What did the missing steps turn out to be?
The unglamorous ones. Before any transcription, a learner needs to use what they just learned — to make a simple solo out of day-one voicings, to hear which notes matter and why, to play something musical while still knowing almost nothing. So he rebuilt everything as a staircase of twenty-one small steps, where each step is climbable from the one before it:
Learn a small thing (a shell, a guide tone line).
Immediately make music with it — however simple.
Only then add the next small thing.
No step assumes an ability the previous step didn't build. That ordering — obvious in hindsight, invisible to experts — is the difference between a course you finish and a course that finishes you. It's the same architecture behind the Fundamentals Program: melodic movement and real jazz language, built one honest stair at a time.
What does care look like in teaching?
Sometimes it looks like dots. For the rebuilt course, Junewon's small team hand-placed every marker showing where each note lives on the instrument, synchronized frame by frame with his hands — he calls it digital knitting, thousands of tiny manual stitches nobody will ever notice unless they're missing. He initially thought it was excessive; the teammate who had once been his student insisted, because he remembered being a beginner who couldn't tell where sounds lived. That's the pattern worth noticing: the best pedagogy usually comes from the person who most recently struggled, not the person who never did. Expertise teaches what; recent struggle teaches how.
What does this mean if you're learning on your own?
It means reinterpreting every wall you hit. One of Junewon's private students — a capable rock player — arrived convinced he simply "couldn't see" his way around jazz. Years of scale-memorization methods had taught him the problem was his memory or his intellect. It wasn't. Given actual steps, he climbed them, and kept saying some version of why did I think I couldn't do this? The answer: because a method that skips steps makes students blame themselves. So when you're stuck, don't ask "what's wrong with me?" Ask "what smaller step is missing?" — and read Why the Right Teacher Grows Your Repertoire, Not Your Scale Drills and Transcription vs. Fretboard Logic for two more angles on finding it.
Where does that leave you this weekend?
With permission to stop blaming yourself, and a filter for choosing teachers: look for the ones who show their staircase, not just their view from the top. If you want to feel what step-by-step actually feels like — chords first, music from day one, no leap of faith required — Building Blocks is where the staircase starts.
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