I have played guitar for something like 17 years, I mostly play blues or blues based rock and roll. Acoustic more than electric these days, but it’s always been a bit of both. For the last two years though I have barely played at all, and this is because two years ago I had my first kid and quit my band (mostly unrelated). At first I thought I was playing less because it’s hard to find time to practice when you have a newborn/baby/toddler running around but now that she is getting older I am realizing that it’s really more that I don’t know what to do now that I am not in a band. I noodle around, more or less without focus, periodically but no serious playing. Sometimes I will try to figure out how to play a specific song or two off the radio, but mostly I don’t know where to start. It turns out I have really crappy practice habits.
For almost 6 years I met up with the same core group of guys and worked on playing original music and covers week in and week out. I spent my practice time working on either specific techniques for a song we were playing, or writing music or what not, and now that I don’t have a reason to play I am feeling like I don’t know what to do. I don’t really want to go in search of a new band right now, but I am feeling myself getting rusty and I need to learn a new practice routine so I can keep my chops up. There are a whole bunch of guitar players on this board, so I figure there is someone out there who can relate to my situation and might have some advice for keeping my skills sharp until I find myself at a place in my life where I can start playing out again. What do you all think?
What I do is make up bits and pieces of different things and place them pseudo-randomly together till I get about 5 min of stuff.
Alternating patterns, Different picking styles, 4/4 to 5/4 to 3/4 beats strung together.
The harder the better, just for excersizing the fingers, not really for a tune.
Think YYZ but more of it.
I practice until I can do it blindfolded.
Then I mess with Ventures, Roy Clark or some Classical stuff for giggles.
I also play around with Yngwie Malmsteen and George Lynch to get ideas.
I have yet to use the actual phrases in anything the band I’m in plays.
It just helps with the concentration , or the lack of needing to think about it too much, cause real tunes are pretty easy after doing the hard stuff. 
Yes, clarifying a path of progress as a solo player can be hard if you are used to the built-in progress demands of a band to learn and/or write new songs.
Some stuff I do:
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check Youtube. On acoustic, I am exploring hybrid picking - holding a flatpick but also using my middle and ring fingers to pluck strings. I either search on hybrid picking or on players who I know use the technique (e.g., James Burton) and cop their licks. What techniques do you wish you could develop more?
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try alternate tunings - i.e., can you play much Stones stuff in Open G? Try Cheater’s G, where you only de-tune the A down to G and play the middle 4 strings for big Open G chords. Your high E and B and G are still in standard tuning so you don’t get lost trying to play leads. Then go to Youtube and look up Tumbling Dice, Honky Tonk Woman, or Black Crowes songs like Jealous Again or Twice as Hard (or Lit Up by Buckcherry ;)) and go to town.
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focus on flow - I, well, I guess I “jam with myself” (is that allowed in most states? ;)). I set up a chord progression - could just be a simple E to A blues groove, or Moondance by Van Morrison or anything that repeats easily - and I work on finding ways to play little licks to fill in the gaps between chords. You see SRV and other great players do it all the time with ease and fluidity - if you find you can’t do it that smoothly, then this is a great way to improve…
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focus on flow - yeah, I am repeating myself, but the point with this bullet is to suggest you establish a different goal vs. “learning a song” to define growth. When I am by myself, trying to flow between chords and lead fills, the more locked-in I get, the more Zen or whatever the experience is - I get in the moment, play a bit less note-wise and make my leads stand out and sound better and move past flubs while staying totally locked in. It is an incredibly good feeling - a real escape from the stress of the day. So setting up a groove and losing yourself in it for 15 minutes is a great goal for when you are playing by yourself…
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Oh, and: ask yourself - do you find your guitar inspiring as a tool? I could care less if it is cool-looking; does it play well and sound excellent to your ear so it makes you want to play it? When I really hunker down and ask myself why I am playing the guitars I play and which ones don’t last long (just sold a very nice acoustic I wasn’t playing - it is a great guitar, but not the inspiring tool for me) it all comes down to which ones demand that I pick them up
Those are the first ideas that come to mind; hope they help!
If you’re not going to be playing with other musicians, then maybe you need to learn some solo repertoire to work on. Going over your part between rehearsals and gigs is a different thing when you have to improve something before next week; when there’s not the goal of getting ‘that moment’ tight with the bass and drums, the part feels more incomplete.
Some solutions -
Record yourself and play along with your own accompaniment.
Accompany yourself singing. Start with easy strumming, but challenge yourself to learn how to balance a complex guitar part with a complex vocal part.
Use software such as Band in a Box, Finale or Sibelius to create an audio track for you to play with or over.
Work on some of the repertoire that’s out there for solo guitar. In classical guitar, there’s a whole progression from easy to intermediate to hard. Perhaps Julio Sagreras book 3 would be a good place for you to start. In jazz, there are arrangements and transcriptions to start from that will stretch your ideas of what is possible. Chet Atkins’ transcriptions are available, Bruce Cockburn, well, there are many, many, many folks. Either work from written transcriptions or transcribe the works by ear yourself. (I’m a classical guy - I prefer to work from written material, myself, and I have to force myself to transcribe by ear because it’s good for me. Pick whatever works for you and go with it, young Jedi.) From there, you progress to writing your own arrangements.
I hope some of that helps - give it a few years, and that little girl that’s running around will start picking up music, too. The most precious gift you can give her is the knowledge that music is a wonderful thing that real people do because it pleases them; it’s not just for the elite or the pros.
Thanks for the responses. I think I am going to take a little bit from each of your posts and get going at it. I particularly like the idea that I take this time to get familiar with some stuff that I might have overlooked before, like alternate tunings and maybe some Jazz guitar. I clicked on the link to the classical book you linked to Le Ministre and got a pit in my stomach and the little voice inside my head told me that it was probably way too advanced for a simple blues hack like me…so maybe I will get that book. I can’t let that sort of self doubt keep me from doing things!
So, explore some new territory and put together a few practice drills like Jamicat mentioned and I should be ok. Thanks for the ideas. This helped a lot.
No, no, don’t be intimidated by Sagreras. The first book assumes you’ve never touched a guitar, the second takes you through music based on basic chord shapes, and the third is just some really pretty music based on chord shapes up and down the neck. This here Raymond Lohengrin fellow has polished some of them nicely for his recording, but they are really satisfying pieces to learn from and sound good even if you’ve only got them just past the sight reading stage.