[Tele1111]

Repertoire maintenance.
That’s what my gigging friends and I call it. It’s absolutely necessary, whether it’s fingerstyle, flat picking or strumming with vocals.
In my experience, the fingerstyle pieces require more attention, but that may be just me.

If I’m in “playing shape”, (gigging regularly, playing daily) I don’t practice much if at all. I play of course, outside of my gigs, but repertoire maintenance is still necessary.

Somewhat similar to what Doug mentioned, I simply have a list of most of the tunes I play. I take two or three a day, and play them as though I was performing. No “cherry picking” allowed. It takes more than a month to play through the entire list, but I’ve not discovered any other method that achieves the same result.

Now I’m not going to pretend that I can always retain pieces this way- but as I’ve said, it’s the best method I’ve found. Long ago, I learned Guy Van Duser’s arrangement of the Stars and Stripes forever. Took me about a year and a half to bring it to performance level. A piece as difficult as that requires much more attention. So I eventually stopped playing it. I can still get through it, but definitely need the tab and notation to get through it. And it’s not at a performance level. What I’m saying, is even if you’re doing repertoire maintenance, some pieces will require much more attention. It’s up to you if you want to invest the time, or sacrifices may have to be made.

Mark