Just Practice Like THIS Every Day
Ever feel like you practice for hours, but you just don’t get any better? Well, the fix is just one simple tweak that will finally get you unstuck.
In this video, I’m going to show you the exact daily practice routine the pros use to break through plateaus and how you can use it to play like this.
Pros Don’t Learn 1000s of Licks
Here’s something that might surprise you about jazz guitarists like Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, and Joe Pass.
They don’t actually have endless vocabularies of licks — they have a small bag of flexible phrases.
Wes Montgomery basically built his entire style on a handful of melodic ideas — and if you listen closely, you can hear the same phrases coming back again and again throughout his solos.
And that’s the key: they know those phrases so deeply that they can make them work in any situation, over any chord, in any context.
Take Grant Green. In his solo on I’ll Remember April,
He plays the same lick 11 times in just the first chorus.
Same phrase — but he’s not just repeating it.
He makes it work on different chords, reshapes the rhythm, changes how he enters it, and how he connects it to what comes next.
The Problem With How Most Guitarists Practice
So what’s their secret?
Well, tell me if this sounds familiar.
You find a cool lick online, you practice it for a few days, try it over a backing track, get excited about the possibilities — but when you try to actually use it in your solos, it sounds stiff, mechanical, nothing like when the pros play it.
So the excitement fades, and you move on to the next shiny lick, and the cycle just repeats itself.
But here’s the thing — it’s not the lick that’s the problem. It’s that you only know how to use it in one place.
One Lick, ALL The Chords
So let me show you exactly how to fix that — with one lick you probably already know.
Bruce Lee said it best:
“I do not fear the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”
And that’s exactly what we’re going to do: “Jazz Kung Fu.”
Jazz Kung Fu – Step #1
The magic ingredient is a simple one-octave Cmaj7 arpeggio — not difficult, not stretchy, just this:
The pros — think Joe Pass or George Benson — are not playing huge, clunky arpeggio positions. They’re using these tiny, one-octave shapes.
Check out how Joe Pass uses them one after another in his solo on Just Friends — different arpeggios, but all the same idea. They’re everywhere.
And our Cmaj7 arpeggio works exactly the same way. So let’s put it to work — check out what Charlie Parker does with it in his solo on Ornithology — I moved it to C major to keep it simple. Pay attention to the rhythm and the chromatic phrase after the arpeggio, because that’s what makes this sound like jazz:
So our lick: A Cmaj7 arpeggio as an eighth-note triplet with a leading note, and Parker follows this up with a descending chromatic phrase.
Simple — and it’s exactly why George Benson uses this shape all the time.
But that’s just the beginning. This arpeggio works in a lot more places than just a Cmaj7 chord — and some of them might surprise you.
Jazz Kung Fu – Step #2
The same Cmaj7 arpeggio also works over Am7 — and here’s why. Sometimes the best arpeggio isn’t built from the root of the chord, it’s built from the 3rd. Am7 has C as its 3rd, and a Cmaj7 arpeggio fits perfectly — it adds a 9th to your sound, which is exactly what the pros are going for: more color.
Wes Montgomery uses this all the time. Here it’s From Four On Six over a quick II V I.
I transposed the II V I from Bb major, again just to keep it simple. Notice that nice resolution to the 6th on Gmaj7:
Before we move to the next chord, here’s how Barney Kessel uses it. This is from his solo over “Green Dolphin Street”
The high C gives you a nice Bebop accent, and he also combines it beautifully with the main Am7 arpeggio.
Learning to play solos that actually sound like Jazz is what I help students do in my Roadmap Course — a step-by-step process for learning to improvise real jazz lines on an actual standard, without spending hours searching YouTube trying to piece it all together.
There’s a link in the description.
Now here’s where it gets interesting — this same arpeggio also works on one of chords that guitarists always struggle with.
Jazz Kung Fu – Step #3”
One of the trickiest chords in jazz is the half-diminished chord — the m7b5. It shows up all the time, but most of the usual tricks just don’t sound right on it.
Here’s the good news: our maj7 arpeggio lick works here too. On an F#ø, the b5 is C — so you can use a Cmaj7 arpeggio from there. And it gives you some beautiful color notes that sound great on the chord.
Here’s what that sounds like in a minor II-V resolving to E minor — and check out how the Cmaj7 arpeggio leads to the B7
That strong sense of direction in the lick is exactly what makes this work — the line knows where it’s going before you do.
So now you’ve got the same lick working on maj7, m7, and m7b5 chords. But what about dominant chords? That’s where a Barry Harris favorite comes in — and it might be the most useful one yet.
If you want all these licks written out so you can practice them at your own pace and start sounding like Wes and Parker, grab the free PDF — link in the description.
Jazz Kung Fu – Step #4
Here’s a classic Barry Harris move that makes dominant chords way easier to solo over. Whenever you see a dominant chord like D7, just play a maj7 arpeggio from the b7. That’s it — Cmaj7 over D7.
Barry always emphasized how important this was, and once you hear it you’ll understand why. Here’s Charlie Parker using it in Ornithology, and notice how he resolves to the 6th of Gmaj7, just like Wes did:
But what about altered dominants? That’s a little less obvious — but there’s a trick that makes it just as simple.
Jazz Kung Fu – Step #5
Now here’s where it gets a little more interesting.
You might have heard that there’s no maj7 arpeggio hiding in the altered scale — so how do we use our smooth maj7 lick over an altered dominant?
Here’s the trick: tritone substitution.
Instead of searching for a maj7 arpeggio inside D7alt, swap it for its tritone substitute — Ab7.
Then use the same Barry Harris trick from the last step: play a maj7 arpeggio from the b7 of Ab7.
That gives you a Gbmaj7 arpeggio over D7alt.
Since this is about a D7 chord, I am going to call it an F#maj7 arpeggio, simply because I want to relate it to the chord and Gb doesn’t work.
It’s always a bit messy with this.
Here’s what that sounds like — and notice the hidden Cmaj7 arpeggio over the Am7 chord before moving into the D7alt lick, which resolves beautifully to Gmaj7:
The rule to remember: on an altered dominant, use the maj7 arpeggio from the 3rd of the chord. F#maj7 over D7alt.
And, of course, if you want to practice this, you can download the PDF and make your own strong licks with this sound.
The “Boring” Triad Exercise
One lick, five chords. But knowing the right notes is only half of it — this next video is about what makes your lines actually sound like jazz. It’s one of the fastest ways to get that real jazz sound, it’s based on simple triads, and it’s all over classic jazz solos—Joe Pass, Wes, Benson. Everywhere!
Check it out!
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