I thought that old age was when we can remember a song we played 30 years ago, but can't remember the song we played while cooking breakfast?

I always thought the songs stuck in the head after a gig were a good thing, FM.  Free music, don't even have to pay to download it.  A little inconvenient if you go to compose, though, and it creeps into everything you're trying to write. LOL

I do think it is good, though, to play a new song a lot the first couple days, when it still has that new song fun to it.  Then drop back to where it gets practiced a reasonable amount along with your other songs, and it'll come along.  But just beating on it beyond that amount doesn't really do any miracles, and just would result in burn-out.  I remember back on college, people would practice pieces for exams or performances to just ridiculous degrees, and I thought in many cases their playing actually went a bit dead or they overcooked the piece a bit as a result.

But with learning anything new, including an instrument, you need to tinker around a bit and find out how much to practice and how hard to practice one thing before you move on to another for the time being.  I'm still finding that for violin/fiddle, but goofy stuff like this helps me get a better idea just seeing "oh, you should practice an hour a day" or 15 min or 5 hrs or whatever it says on some website somewhere.  What is actually optimal is going to vary from person to person and you need to find what works for you.

I practice about an hour in the morning, but that is mostly scales and arpeggios.  The "work" part of practice.  But I leave the instrument out most of the day and night, so that I can pick up and just play songs whenever the mood strikes.  That adds up to maybe a total of another hour most days.  On good days, probably another hour spent on other instruments here and there throughout the day.  More than that I probably can't do most days, since there's only so many hours in a day.

ftufc: Yeah, if I want to stay good on a piece on any song, I need to play it at least a couple times a week.  If I go more than 6 months without playing an instrument, then I need to spend at least a half hour a day to "get my hands back" for it.  Might take a week, might take a month, but it would takes a lot less time to get back to being at least ok on the instrument than it took to learn it in the first place.  Since I play several different instruments, there is almost always at least one that is being badly neglected.  Currently it would be piano/keyboard.  If I went right now and dusted off the keys (literally, since I haven't touched them in several months), I wouldn't be able to do much.  But a week or few of scales and basics and doing some easy pieces at first, and I'd have it back.  I know, since I've done that a few times over the years.   You don't learn the instrument or song all over again, it comes back to you in much less time than it took to learn it in the first place.  You just need to refresh on it a bit.  If I sat down at the keyboard right this minute, it would be a lot of goofs and botches.  "Thud and blunder" as we used to call it.  But when I've been playing keys regularly, things like this are pretty easy to put together.

Yup that's me playing.  One and a half of me, if you want to be precise, since I felt it needed a bit more right after I did it and went through and added another track of right hand. 

But yes, I can see where that is a bit of an enigma.  The only thing I can think of is perhaps there is a difference in how you think when playing the violin.  Perhaps you focused less on the note names and theory when learning it than you did with piano/keyboards so it doesn't store in your brain's memory quite the same way? 

That is pretty cool, NV!   I googled "suzuki 100 times" to find out more about it and found out apparently some teachers give out stickers too.  I guess that is one of those things that makes it harder to teach yourself.  No stickers. 

I am very boring.  I didn't even think of anything like a gumball coloring sheet.  I just made marks on a sheet of paper.  Ah well.

LOL