LOA
Following your advice I started the LOA approach on the 1st of May and hope to soon send in my recordings after I figure out the necessary computer skills. That's an adventure! Wanted to mention one thing about LOA. I'm sure you've given this consideration but here goes anyways. The material is of course excellent. However, given that the different study areas are to be done concurrently I'm finding I put in a fair amount of effort deciding what to do next and then more time keeping track of what I've studied and completed. For instance, I have to decide whether or not to continue on with the next chorus of Walk With Me or jump back to chorus forms or go to solo harmonica or spend some time with Joe T. or Joe F. The bottomline is if you decide to organize the material in LOA's into a step by step process I would welcome it.
My guess is I'm doing LOA differently than others. Rather than working through all of Walk With Me followed by chorus forms then solo harmonica my preference is to work on a bit of each every day. I don't aways work on something new from each study area every day as that would be too much but I do work on something new daily by watching one of your videos. With this approach I slowly increase my knowledge of each study area concurrently with plenty of time for daily review.The ony negative with my approach is you've got a lot of great material I have to keep track of. That's a great problem to have!
Good to see you on here, Smoke (you know me from Adam's board, where I'm mirco). I agree that there is a lot of content in the LOA, and that's a good thing, but it can be overwhelming.
With the LOA, some parts take considerably more effort than others. For example, the study songs will take weeks of concentrated effort, but the solo harmonica or the music theory can be mastered fairly quickly. So, this is my approach to tackling the LOA (which you might find useful):
Master a chorus of the study song each week. Practice the chorus 20-30 minutes a day. Alternate between listening to Dave playing the chorus and then playing along with him.
Spend about 10 minutes on technique, whatever technique you're working on now. At LOA-1, it would be tongue slapping. I'm right now spending my 10 minutes on developing vibrato and playing the 1st position major scale on different harps.
Spend at least 20 minutes on something else in the LOA, like the Solo Harmonica or the Music Theory. If you spend 20 minutes a day on these other things, you'll be able to get through them by the time you finish up with the 6 or 7 choruses of the study song.
Thank you SmokeJS for your input. I recommend you print out the PDF that's on the main LOA page... this will help keep it simple for you.