[studley]

I've found Anki useful for focusing piano practice. Each piece of music I have worked on over the years has a few tricky bars in it. Before Anki, I was really bad at remembering which bars I was bad at in each piece, and would tend to practice the bars I already know how to play, which is pleasant to do.

Today, I have one deck, which has a flashcard for each set of tricky bars from all the pieces I've worked on. Now when I sit down to practice the piano, I just load up that deck, and those bars are what I practice, and I grade myself on each flashcard to indicate how quickly I need to re-practise those particular tricky bars.

I've done this 5+ year now, and I'm impressed at how good the default algorithm seems to be at effectively ordering my piano practice sessions.

[degosuke]

I was just wondering how to apply anki for learning guitar tabs. Can you please share a sample of one of your piano cards?

[studley]

For the "front", I give a title like "Sonata K.545 - The turn". And then the "back" is a screenshot of a few bars (usually between 2 and 5 bars). If those bars happen to be towards the end of a line, I'll also include a screen shot of the clef (left-hand side), so I know the key!

When I am using the deck, on each card, I immediately hit the "space" key to show the back (because I am not using the deck to "memorize"). I practice the few bars on the screenshot, and then when I am bored (usually after a minute or two), I grade myself, by hitting the most relevant button (Again, Hard, Good, Easy), which gives the algorithm the info it needs to know when it should show me those bars to me again.

The deck works great on a PC, iPad or phone. Piano Practice in your pocket at all times!

[degosuke]

This is very helpful. Thank you. So in a way these are like practice cards and not only memory cards.

[studley]

Exactly!

[fudged71]

I saw someone saying the exact same thing for practicing tying knots.

There’s something there. Physical skills learned with spaced repetition.

[rossant]

Wow nice, thanks for the tip! I'd never have thought of using spaced repetition for piano practice, sounds like great advice.