Hello all, Anki newbie here! I came up with what I think is a fantastic idea, so… naturally I assume it’s already been done haha. If it has indeed been done, please point me in the right direction to using it. If not, I’d appreciate guidance on how to create it myself.
My goal is to construct a music practice tool, integrating the deliberate practice model with spaced repetition. You’d create a deck for each piece, with each card being a measure number (or group of measures).
Please let me know what’s possible and what isn’t! The other big question is - what would be the best way to set up the deck options? The cards would need to be brought back in a way that works well for musical practice, but I’m not exactly sure what that would look like.
Cool! Thank you. I read the article, but I don’t think it was exactly what I’m looking for. Anki has a great spaced repetition model, which I was trying to integrate through it’s own structure. But, there’s too much I wanted to do that Anki can’t. I ended up writing my own application for a deliberate practice loop, but using FSRS for the spaced repetition timing. Thank you!
One idea could be adding short notes/audio clips to each card so you can quickly remember the phrasing or technique you were focusing on. For deck options, maybe shorter review intervals at the start would work better than standard language-learning settings since muscle memory fades differently. Also, for naming sections or organizing practice categories, I sometimes use tools from to make labels easier to spot visually in my notes. Small thing, but it helps keep practice organized. use different fonts for these.
I like your idea of having each song be its own separate deck. Anki doesn’t really have a way to keep sibling cards together (just a way to space them out), so putting the pieces of a song in the same deck would be the way to do it.
What I would suggest is not chopping up a whole song into a deck, just the difficult parts of the song. I’d probably make the unit “musical phrase”, somewhere in the 2-8 measure range usually, but whatever makes sense for the song you’re working on.
Whenever a the deck for a song has cards due, you do those cards, then once you’ve finished all the “due” cards for the deck, you play the whole song through once.
I think playing the whole song through at the end is going to be very important. You may practice difficult passages separately, but too much focus on that can lead to robotic technique-focused playing. Playing the whole song through after you’ve practiced the difficult parts will help you keep the music part of it alive (and make practicing a lot more fun). It will also mean the whole song gets practiced at a frequency set by its most difficult chunk, which feels appropriate.
It might also help to come up with a set of tags for why each passage you put into Anki is difficult. Because every now and then, you may want to use Anki’s “custom study” feature to give yourself a day of focusing on a particular thing, whether the cards for that technique are due that day or not.
A few more thoughts on combining Anki and music (two things that I love, so I love your idea!)
Anki and spaced repetition are good for memorization, but musical practice doesn’t always work the same way. For music practice it’s usually a good idea to practice something very frequently at first - first you get to the point where you can play something well, then you start spacing it out. If you start spacing it out too soon, you’ll hurt your progress.
With memorization, extra repeats when you already remember a thing may not help you that much. With music, extra repeats in the early stage are essential to keep refining and improving how you play something.
This might be a case where it’s better to use SM-2 than FSRS. FSRS is very well-suited for memorization, but not for anything else. With SM-2, you can set properties like the hard multiplier, the easy bonus, etc. by hand. So you could probably come up with a grading system that’s more about “how well did I play this?” or “how much more practice with this do I think I need?” instead of the firm “did I remember this or not?” cutoff FSRS needs, and use the SM-2 settings to make the grading buttons fit your system.
The other big advantage of SM-2 for this is that you can set a lot of learning steps without confusing the algorithm. Which fits with the way music practice works, that you need to practice something a lot before you’re good enough at it to start spacing out the practice. Spaced repetition comes into the picture once you’ve gotten good at playing something and need to periodically refresh your memory of how to play it well.