Spaced Repetition

[Wilktone]

The concept of "spaced repetition" is practicing something using increasing amounts of time between repetitions in order to move information from short-term into long-term memory. I've been using this method of practice and study for a long time and found it extremely helpful.

Here's a neat interactive explanation of spaced repetition, if you're not already familiar with it. Even if you are, you might enjoy looking through it:

https://ncase.me/remember/

I've recently been using Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net) to help me utilize spaced repetition for a non-musical project I'm working on. It's sort of a virtual flash card app. It's been helpful enough that I've started applying it to maintaining my list of memorized tunes and adding new tunes to that list. It could be helpful for practice with different scales, keys, or even technique practice.

After you test yourself on the Anki cards it will ask you to rate your performance in four ways: 1. Again, 2. Hard, 3. Good, 4. Easy. Depending on how you rate your performance on that card and how long you've been working on that card in Anki it will then automatically space out when you'll need to work on it again. For example, it might bring that card back minutes later, or maybe days or weeks later. So for memorizing tunes, for example, I'll spend less time on tunes that I already know really well, but they'll come up from time to time to keep them fresh. Tunes that I haven't gotten committed to memory will come up more frequently, but will gradually be spaced out over time to take advantage of the spaced repetition approach.

If you don't want to us an app, look through the presentation I linked to above and it has a way you can do something similar using a shoe box and index cards.

Dave