There is a very specific look people give you when you play a wrong note. Now imagine playing six wrong notes in a row, on purpose, and having jazz musicians nod approvingly instead. That witchcraft has a name, and it is called playing "outside."
This clip is Lick #46: pianist Dave Kikoski's outside line over the classic "Compared to What," lovingly stolen and re-fingered for guitar. It is a bite-sized crash course in how deliberately "wrong"-sounding notes can resolve into something hip, smug, and thoroughly sophisticated.
How outside playing (and side-slipping) actually works
The secret is embarrassingly simple: your ear forgives almost any note as long as you land somewhere safe at the end. The most reliable trick here is side-slipping — you take a line that fits the chord, shove the whole shape up a half step so every note is suddenly a semitone "wrong," let that tension hang for a beat, then slide it back down into the real key. Because the outside notes sit a half step away from the chord tones, everything resolves by the tiniest possible step, which our ears read as delicious tension rather than a mistake. Kikoski does exactly this over "Compared to What": he flirts with the note a half step off, then resolves it home like nothing happened.
The concrete takeaway: don't play outside randomly. Outside playing only sounds intentional when the resolution is intentional. Play one bar inside, one bar shifted up a half step, then land firmly on a chord tone on the downbeat — the strong beat is your alibi. Master that half-step-away-and-back motion and you have the core of nearly every hip chromatic approach in the book. If you want the full toolkit, my four ways to play outside breaks it down further.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, play it slowly, and enjoy the moment your family walks in convinced you've forgotten how to play guitar — right up until it resolves and you look like a genius. Support the tabs and original videos on Patreon.