Rob and Balt-i-sar,
Thanks so much for the encouragement. Indeed there's a point in life when a certain kind of 'freedom' sets in. At my age I look at an activity like this -- taking up the Stick -- with a combination of both resignation and joy. I'm free of any illusions or pressure about 'accomplishing much'. This will just be a gentle enjoyment, a bit of time every day with fingers and mind, strings and tones. It'll be sittin-on-the-porch-in-the-breeze alistening to whatever modest harmony, melody, and rhythm I manage to weave out of the thing on any particular day.
All that said, I still want to be fair to myself and try to apply myself intelligently, finding and using the best approaches, methods, and materials. I'm figuring that a lead time of several months will pass until I get an actual Stick into my hands. So, I've come up with a plan for not letting that wait time go to waste.
I have a voice training CD in my car and I practice solfege a bit when driving alone. I have EarMaster Pro and I try to do some ear training with that. I'm studying Jamie Andreas' "Principles of Correct Guitar Practice" as my approach for efficiently acquiring muscle memory. For rhythm and timing I may take up Luc Bergeron's suggestion to learn from Ted Reed's "Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer". I'm carefully watching DVD,s (Culbertson and Howard) and various YouTube Stick videos, and will study the books by Chapman, Howard, and Adelson. Also I'm reading and internalizing some practical theory on scales, chord construction, and chord tone soloing. I'm making a list of all (or most) of the various chords and their inversions and how their formulas are built up from intervals.
Finally, I've been using the FretFind2D webpage (
http://www.ekips.org/tools/guitar/fretfind2d/) to print out true-to-scale layouts of Stick fretboards. I've then been marking the strings and frets of each layout with the notes as they occur in each various tuning. I now have paper layouts with reciprocal 4ths-5ths, reciprocal major 3rds- minor 6ths, bi-directional tritone, reciprocal minor 3rds - major 6ths, and finally NON-reciprocal major 3rds straight across. Next I'm going to actually glue these paper fretboard layouts onto some 1x4 pine boards and experiment with how ergonomic each tuning is for my hands and fingers in managing all those scales and chord shapes. Soon I hope to have a solid opinion about which tuning I want to commit to. Ergonomics and simplicity are the HUGE factors for me!
Once I have made my tuning choice I'm going to take my pine board and attach wires flat onto the board to represent frets. I'll take some old guitar strings and tighten them across those 'frets' to simulate the strings and so as to give me some rough feel (but without sound) of a Stick fretboard. That done I'll then be able to begin some rudimentary muscle memory training toward carefully programming my fingers for touching the fake strings in various scale and chord combinations.
I think that all is about the best I can do until the postman shows up with the real thing. It should keep me busy at least...