Computer & guitar: MIDI guitar, get a cheap guitar with a hardtail bridge and decent intonation and set it up for midi sequencing, make this a part of my practice/composition setup; playing direct into an audio interface; Native Instruments/Guitar Rig/drum groove setup (can I play the Native Instruments drum grooves without a DAW?); getting a good tone with what I have; Guitar Rig has a metronome with a great number of time signatures available, use this to practice ideas, Rig also has tape recorders pre and post so I can record myself playing something and then play along with it; I need a DAW with a better audio interface and a permanent recording setup: guitar -> pedalboard -> D.I./signal splitter -> one side direct to DAW, the other side to the amp, amp recorded with SM-57 just off the cone of one of the speakers, attached to another channel of the audio interface (or just use the amp for live monitoring);

Bottleneck: setup my Strat for bottleneck playing; get out all my slides and see what works best with an electric guitar (the brass slides may not be best for electric); work on figuring out some chords in different keys, working with ideas from Keith Richards (chords in open-G tuning), Sonny Landreth (fretting behind the slide), and Ry Cooder (expressiveness); check out Hound Dog Taylor, Robert Nighthawk, Elmore James, Son House, Muddy Waters; work out bottleneck versions of hill country blues, soul & funk, Afrobeat, jazz heads, folk melodies; work out guide tone lines and riffs to use for accompaniments; work on some chord changes, using two and three note voicings, played quietly and mixed with simple bottleneck riffs; re-learn the Fred McDowell stuff, work it up into a repertoire of at least five tunes I can perform from memory; work on the R.L. Burnside stuff, adding at least two tunes to my repertoire; work on the Son House stuff, adding 3-5 tunes to the repertoire; work on Muddy Waters tunes, adding at least five tunes to the repertoire; work on learning 3 Lightning Hopkins tunes with a bottleneck. Here is the tally so far:

  1. Fred McDowell, 5
    • “Shake them on down”
    • “Write me a few of your lines”
    • “Lay my burden down”
    • “Louise”
    • “You got to move”
  2. R.L. Burnside, 2
    • “Poor Black Mattie”
    • “Jumper hanging on the line”
  3. Son House, 5
    • “death letter blues”
    • “dry spell blues”
    • “depot blues”
  4. Muddy Waters, 5
    • “baby please don’t go”
    • “mannish boy”
  5. Lightning Hopkins, 3
    • “baby please don’t go”

I guess I’m shooting for a repertoire of 15-20 bottleneck tunes to begin with; this should give me a number of grooves to play with. After this, go for:

  1. Elmore James
  2. Hound Dog Taylor
  3. Blind Willie Johnson
  4. Tampa Red
  5. more Lightning Hopkins
  6. more Fred McDowell
  7. Jessie Mae Hemphill (she doesn’t play with a slide, but her tunes really lend themselves to bottleneck playing)

Push the envelope a bit on the bottleneck repertoire; see if I can get a working repertoire of 40-60 tunes; keep a list of tunes and transcription notes, and keep these tunes in development for a while; practice them like I practice the jazz fingerstyle stuff, memorizing them and then keeping them simmering with all the other tunes, cycling through them and getting them just a little more solid every time I play them; play the tunes rather than practice them, memorize and then play

Fretted guitar: re-learn the Morgen and Galbraith fingerstyle pieces; work on my blues playing:

  1. Charlie Patton
  2. Muddy Waters
  3. Blind Lemon Jefferson
  4. Big Bill Broonzy
  5. Joseph Spence
  6. hill country and Memphis blues

For this stuff I should focus on getting the grooves done in different keys; get used to using a capo; play both pickstyle and fingerstyle; don’t be afraid to re-tune the instrument; experiment with tunings and various keys; get a sense of vocal ranges in various keys, then write some melodies using the different registers, write some words for the melodies.

Forget about being a jazz guitarist, except for the fingerstyle solos. Work on being a better blues guitarist, and add some elements of jazz to the playing. Learn some funk and Afrobeat. Work out tunes in different keys, tempos/tempi, and time signatures. Work on getting a great Strat tone for both bottleneck and standard tuning. Play more pickstyle guitar, but don’t lose sight of the fact that I am a fingerstyle player.