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I've never heard of spaced repetition before, but from internet it looks interesting. How are you applying it to mandolin?
The overarching goal of spaced repetition is to practice the things you're poor at, while spending less time where you already excell. I've been using it to help maintain my repetoire, primarily. It helps to combat the tendancy to spend all of my time playing tunes I know well and neglecting those I don't. I have one deck for each phase of my practice session. A deck for exercises, a deck for A level tunes (which I am memorizing and can benefit from being broken down into one-measure phrases), a deck for B level tunes (which I have memorized, and add cards as I increase tempo), a deck for C level tunes (which are in my repetoire and I wish to maintain them). Obviously, tunes migrate up the decks as I get better with them. In theory, I should put everything in one deck and it should all work. In practice, I've found that I get more emotional satisfaction from this division of effort, even if it may not be most efficient.
There are a lot of different ways to use spaced repetition for learning the mandolin (or anything). Ryan's basic description is correct--the program helps you to optimize your scheduling of materials for review. In a perfect spaced repetition program, you are always working on something that is slightly difficult, either because it is new or has not been reviewed for a while. The better you know something, the further the repetitions get spaced. I have been using a spaced repetition system for about a year now, and I have come up with a way to break down new songs into single measures, then two measures, then four, etc. So first I master each measure, and then increasingly longer sections, until I have mastered the whole song. The hard parts get a lot of review, the easy parts less. Even after I am playing the whole song, pieces of it will come up for review according to how hard they are. In addition to repertoire, spaced repetition can be used to schedule work on scales, picking, chords, or anything else. The downside is that it can be labor intensive to put the material you want to learn into an S R system.
Thanks for the replies - I'll give it some thought. I have never been very organised / disciplined in my practivce, so this could help.
