Coming along nicely, Steve.
Good to see you including some blues in your 2025 plan. My cult leader @TheMadman_tobyjenner has been working on Hamburger’s fingerstyle courses and recorded one of the courses. I’m surprised you never enrolled in BLIM Class 2, you would have got more out of it that the current Blues Lead course.
James, thanks. I will enroll in the BLIM course eventually. I have a ton of blues resources to look through and I will finally have the time to focus on blues now that have put grade 2 consolidation behind me. Take a look at the post from June 4 especially the middle picture where you will notice the stack of M. Schwartz GuitarJamz acoustic and blues solo lessons on DVD. I can also get them streaming but I’m a little old school and I still have a DVD reader attached to my 45” LG TV.
BTW, I am surprised that you don’t have Moises in your software list. I just started working with it recently and found it useful and easy to use and free 
I use RipX DAW. It gives me more options than Moises as can be used for other purposes. It cost me about £75 for a perpetual licence and updates have been free.
James, thanks for the info. I was not familiar with that software, but I am still a digital noob when it comes to music software One of my unwritten goals for this year is to better learn to use GarageBand, GuitarPro and Moises to create recordings of me playing to backing tracks and of course to use my DAW a little more instead of the lazy recording by phone.
4Jan2025 - I am finished playing through the new (to me) blues specific videos this week from Grade 4 that I will be learning in the next few months:
5 Blues Licks from Pattern 1 - Essential Blues Lead Guitar section
Using Blues Licks Effectively - Essential Blues Lead Guitar section
Boom Bass with Licks - Solo Blues Guitar With MatchMySound
Steady Thumb Primer - Solo Blues Guitar With MatchMySound
Vari-Shuffle Climb - Blues Guitar Studies
Tore Up A Sidestep - Blues Guitar Studies
I had a post in someone else’s post about beginner/intermediate motivation and someone’s response about lack of rock in the intermediate grades. I decided that.I needed to line here since it has some learning log appropriate notes:
The last sentence in this post represents an update to my learning plans:
I just remembered that I am also reviewing grade 3, which in the classic song organization, is heavy on rock songs, so I’ll still be working on rock songs while learning blues in grade 4, particularly in the JG Rock Songbook.
Hi @SteveL_G99 Steve. Interesting to see how you’ve planned your practice out. I see you focus on different things each week and dedicate particular weeks to other courses, songs etc with a dedicated week for technique. I’d be curious to know how you arrived at this pattern as it’s different from my approach of trying to do a bit of everything each week. Do you find it easier to just focus your time on one topic and then move on?
Happy New Year by the way!
Stuart, I have developed this type of practice schedule gradually over the past 2 years. I do find it easier to not switch too often between topics or areas of focus.
If you look back at some of my practice schedules at the beginning of the my learning log - 20Nov2022, 12Jan2023 and 21Mar2023, I was just doing the technique exercises and learning a new song each week while working on grade 3 and saying.I was doing grade 2 consolidation. I had to add an actual week of working on grade 2 review and consolidation every other week to make sure I actually finished grade 2 consolidation. I had to add a week of working on songs, because I was not focusing enough time on songs. Then I finally added another week to use outside tutorials on blues, fingerstyle and rock and allow time for classical guitar just because it was fun for me.
All of this is based on at least 30 minutes of practice time each day. If I have more time, i just work on songs. If I had an hour each day that I could depend on, then I would shorten the time between technique weeks.
Most of this is just to find something that works for me, but trying different approaches. You have to find what works for you. 
Happy new year!!
Thanks Steve. I agree with you that each person needs to develop what works for them but it’s interesting to see how other people structure things. I probably won’t change anything up for myself right now but you have given me something to hold in reserve and try out in future if things are not working for me at any point. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about structuring practice like this but I can see how it might be a benefit.
9Jan2024 - I am having fun starting the lessons in Grade 4 this week. I did discover when working on blues licks from the 5 licks lesson in blues lead, that I need to put lighter strings on my Strat. I have 10s (10-46 D’Addario XLs) strings and 5 minutes of string bending really gives you pain in the bending fingers. I’ll probably replace with to a set with 8s.
I added an old guitar method to my practice that I had never completed. I had done the first book but gave away and had to repurchase books 2 and 3:
Even though the font, style and format of the pages is a little old-fashion, like from a 1960s Mel Bay book, the books were updated in the early 2000s and the song focus in the rock lessons has a good emphasis on Texas blues rock, like ZZ Top and SRV. So I am reviewing the guitar method book 1 and rock shop book 1 and using the simpler rock and blues exercises to practice entering songs into Guitar Pro.
10Jan2025 - The most important step in my learning this week is becoming familiar with the guitar fretboard by finding notes all over the neck of the guitar. Since a note only occurs once in an 11 semi-tone or fret region, it is easy to find a note on each string. Using the octave shapes also helps. I used copies of the fretboard notes found at the back of the Belwin Guitar method. After I did this for the C notes all over the fretboard, I decided to also do that for the other notes (E and G) in the C major chord triad. I colored the 1,3, and 5 scale notes with different colors (red, green and blue). It was easy to see the CAGED shapes. What surprised me is that the open chord shapes for C were in the order C, A, G, E and D shapes. I did this exercise for the A, G, E and D chords with the scales notes from the keys that the chords are the root or primary chord. The resulting map is done by hand and I will refine at some point in the future, but I believe that this will be a major point of reference in intermediate guitar as I compare to the major scale patterns. Here is my CAGED map:
13Jan2025 - Fortunately I have built a lot of flexibility in my schedule. I have woken up several mornings with pain in my ring finger tip. I guess I worked it a little too hard doing the full tone bend in blues lick 1 and I need to rest the fingertip. I am switching weeks 2 and 3 and doing grade 3 review and classical guitar this week. Since I was going to do the grade 3 music theory review as part of grade 3 review, I did 15 minutes of classical guitar review using just first, second and fourth finger (or pinky) for fretting the notes. I did 15 minutes of music theory review which gave me a chance to look at the new lessons in grade 1 of the PMT course. UPDATE: It only took me 2 days to review PMT grades 1 and 2 and retake the tests. I have started the PMT grade 3 review on day 3.
