Some thoughts on guitar practice:

Harmonic Mechanisms: re-learn the major scale triad exercises in all keys; re-learn the harmonic minor triad exercises; riff on these triad exercises and come up with bass lines; find some exercises with movement in the bass; start working on open position triads, both as Van Eps voices them and as Goodrick voices them; look for exercises with inner voices moving; practice the open voicings along with a very slow metronome in order to emphasize definition in my phrasing;

Blues: walking bass line comping, piano-like guitar comping, soloing over the changes, especially hitting the II/V phrases (check out Aebersold’s Blues In All Major Keys and Blues In All Minor Keys as well as Arnold’s chord voicings for blues in both minor and major keys), uses of the blues scale, bebop scales, etc., uses of space in crafting an improvisation, improvising by creating phrases; play the blues on the bass and on the piano; work on hill country & delta blues guitar playing and repertoire in general, but specifically focus on Son House, Fred McDowell, and R.L. Burnside; read some more blues history stuff, especially since I may be teaching music history again soon; read the few blues history texts I have bought that I haven’t read yet; read background history, be able to tell the broader history surrounding and including the music, be able to talk about the literature and popular culture related to the music, read a history of sound recoding and reproduction, start to gather listening resources for teaching and research; put up a page on the GitHub portfolio site dedicated to online primary materials;

Technique: scales and arpeggios, nice and smooth, major and (useful) melodic minor modes, along with appropriate chord voicings; use the metronome; practice scales in melodic cells and sequences; practice both fingerstyle and pickstyle playing; get more comfortable with the Strat, playing both fingerstyle and pickstyle, work on playing the blues stuff on the Strat as well as the National; setup the Strat for bottleneck, leaving it easy to fret; although, since I already have the instrument strung with 0.012-0.560 strings the action the instrument currently has may be sufficient; think about using a glass slide; get more comfortable with the whammy bar and the floating bridge in general, loosen it up a bit on the instrument; setup my guitar and amp so they are plugged and ready to go with the flip of a switch; find some way to setup a permanent recording rig for guitar - should I spend the time to get used to playing through the Line 6 direct into the computer, amping the music and adding effects with Guitar Rig? Can my analog snobbery stand it?;

Musicianship: learn the major and melodic minor scales and modes on the piano and the bass as well as the guitar; come up with simple grooves for various modes, using piano, guitar, and bass, then practice improvising over the grooves; practice sight reading lead sheets at the guitar and piano; do ear training exercises at the guitar and piano; practice chord changes, transposing to different keys; work on improving my sense of time in playing, practice regularly with a metronome, placing melodies and riffs just behind the beat; get comfortable with some sort of drum looping setup, like a drum groove software; better yet, continue using Finale like a MIDI sequencer, setting up my own spare percussion parts (see the next category for further comment on Finale);

Composition: record myself playing grooves in different time signatures with the metronome, using piano, guitar, and bass where possible; record myself playing modal grooves, for improv and composition; play with different key signatures and time signatures, tempi/tempos (whichever), metric modulation; make a bunch of grooves with well established key centers, but no thirds, adding the major or minor 3rd or the 11th/sus4 is part of the improvisation, improv is light and textural, flirting with different modes and chord changes and accents against a rhythm or tempo; try getting used to the digital delay, play with its settings; work some more with Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, but don’t get too caught up in it, though the compositional exercises could be written for guitar and percussion, emphasizing modal grooves for improv and compositional practice; start using Finale to record guitar parts directly into the software

Repertoire: re-learn the Howard Morgen fingerstyle arrangements, and begin working with the original lead sheets of these tunes; work on hill country & delta blues guitar playing and repertoire; work on Son House, Fred McDowell, and R.L. Burnside tunes; dig back into the Big Bill Broonzy tunes, learning the melodies and lyrics, but most importantly lock down the grooves, this is a good style for medium to fast tempos/tempi, so I should work on locking down the tunes with a metronome; learn all the guitar parts associated with a bunch of Fela’s tunes, sequence the drum and bass parts, then screencast myself teaching those guitar parts.