Let me layout the four aspects of music and muse a little bit on practice.

Melody: learn jazz heads on bottleneck guitar; practice scales in different keys for bottleneck playing; continue learning traditional bottleneck tunes; learn how to read notation in open tunings; sing all the lines written as compositional exercises; try to play some lines from Stravinsky (check out the scores I have); practice melodies in different keys; work on sight singing, paying particular attention to movable-Do solfege; listen to more music, and transcribe more; transcribe lyrics from blues tunes; learn to sing all the blues tunes I can play on guitar; play melodies along with the recordings (I’m thinking now about Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Moves on the Water”); learn a bunch of jazz-blues heads and solfege the melodies;

Harmony: work on chords and chord tones in open-G and open-E; continue studying from Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, writing out the compositional exercises; learn parts from the compositional exercises on the bottleneck guitar; practice the piano, paying particular attention to bass lines, voice leading, and chord voicing; continue to practice chords on the guitar in standard tuning; work on Van Eps’s Harmonic Mechanisms so I can produce harmonies with moving lines; learn chord phrases from jazz tunes and practice them in different keys; work on Arnold’s Key Note Recognition as well as the exercises that follow it; play pieces from Bartok’s Mikrokosmos on both piano and guitar; sing lines from chord changes; practice jazz-blues changes (Aebersold and Arnold) and chord tone soloing on the blues;

Rhythm: use the metronome; practice different time signatures (12/8, 9/8, 6/8, 8/4, 7/4, etc.); practice swing; work out some grooves in different time signatures and practice locking them down; sing notated rhythms; play along with recordings of West African drumming, trying to blend bottleneck blues with drumming; comb through Hindemith’s Elementary Training for the Musician for various time signatures and rhythms; practice singing Arnold’s Odd Time Signatures exercises, setting the metronome to the eighth note tempo, practice marking the first beat of every measure before moving on to the notated rhythms; practice 16th note rhythms; learn all the drum parts for agbekor and gahu on the guitar; compose something for practicing agbekor and gahu; think of music while I exercise, using the tempo of aerobic exercise;

Timbre: timbre is the least understood aspect of music in terms of theory, but musicians know it intimately; work on my electric bottleneck guitar tone so that I can more closely emulate a musical voice; try out different slides to see if there is one that works best on an electric guitar (so far I still prefer the brass Latchlake Music Acousta-glide slide); sell my Fender amp and buy something smaller; with a smaller amp, work on getting an overdriven tone; sort out the noise coming from my pedalboard; try other effects in my signal chain; buy some more effects, particularly analog delay, phase shifter, different overdrive pedals, a wah pedal, something funky, something spaced out; read more about timbre.