I enjoyed this lesson. Makes sense based on what I’ve read about how the brain works, and adds colour to what I’ve experienced memorising/learning songs. Even “easy” songs are hard to remember if you just play it a couple of times, but the ones that I play day after day really stick.
5 minutes at a time to learn a complicated song seems too short though, it would take ages to learn that way. When learning something new I usually want to play it a lot longer in the first session. But makes a lot of sense for the repetitions.
The spacing effect lesson is timely since I can use it to leverage Justin’s Campfire, Developer, and Dream song classification system and online singing lessons, both of which I implemented as a result of Justin’s recent respective lessons.
In response to Justin’s recommendation to use a scheduled revision calendar that includes 6 follow-up dates (1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, and 1 year), I added color-coded tags to my online guitar journey system corresponding to each scheduled date for each song that I add to my calendar.
I’m beginning to prioritize and schedule follow-up dates for existing and new “Developer Songs” that will enable me to systematically transfer each song from “Developer” to “Campfire” status. Furthermore, song transfers should occur sooner than would otherwise be the case if I didn’t use the calendar system. This should also allow me to prioritize and work on “Dreamer” songs sooner than I would otherwise do.
Instead of manually spacing your practice, you could also use a tool like Anki, which is specifically designed to schedule your learning material in optimal intervals. I use Anki for everything guitar related as well as for other types of studying, and it has proven extremely effective.
Another big plus is that you don’t have to manually schedule your practice routine anymore.
On the downside, Anki is a bit hard to get into, but there are many tutorials online.
If you want to try it just be sure to download the official version, since there are many copycats around who try to make money off of an open-source project.
I hope posting links is allowed, this site is the official one: https://apps.ankiweb.net/
This is interesting Lars @kochi85. Can you share a bit more detail about how you organize your decks for guitar practice? I can imagine variou approaches…curious to know what has worked for you.
That’s actually going to be harder than memorizing it in the first place.