Something important to most learning disciplines, whether a maths degree or learning sound design, is to have a good system of taking notes. For me, this wiki is central to how I take notes on things. I did play with Obsidian, which is popular, (and it is not hard to turn notes from this wiki into content that Obsidian will happily read as a vault). The thing with obsidian is that it is a local app, and I wanted something which I could readily edit given only a web browser, whether on a desktop, laptop, or mobile phone. I've always loved wikis, since the 90s, and gradually learned to write my own, eventually resulting in Purple Tree 2, which is what I use now.

General Discipline

1. Memorising is expensive, but best for things that need to be at immediate recall.
2. Aim to have your notes as your first port of call for anything you cannot remember.
3. Thus, if something is not in your notes, research it, and then write it in your notes so that it is there for next time.
4. Practice activities which entail reading back your notes and reconstructing things, so as to test that they work reliably as notes. If you note something down today, and then two years later find out that your notes aren't good enough, quite possibly whatever the notes were meant to record is lost.

As Applied To Sound Design

1. A good way to learn is to take a synth (I'm currently focusing on Zebra 2/HZ) and copy patches. This works even better if they come with midi to illustrate their use.
2. When copying a patch, don't copy it directly. Rather, look through a patch, write notes on its settings. And then use your notes, and only your notes, to recreate the patch. At first you may have limited success. But with time and practice, you get good enough at it.
3. Very common patterns, write up notes on, and then memorise them through repetition.
4. Explore what you do and do not need to record, and ways of writing them efficiently.
5. Moreover, for this process to work, you have to learn to spot all the settings in a synth, so it is a great aid for finding everything: if your copy doesn't sound right, figure out what is different. Zebra's actually quite good for this since most things are knobs and most knobs are always visible if their associated module is in use. (And the module layout is visualised for you in the UI.)

Terse Efficient Notes

I'll start with one particular example known to chess players: algebraic notation and FEN. PGN writes down the moves of an entire game; FEN writes down a single position. Both are very terse and space efficient. PGN means we can write e.g. 1. d4 d5 2. c4 dxc4 3. Qd3?? cxd3! and any seasoned chess player will not only be able to reproduce the moves given only these few characters, but experience players can probably visualise the game given just the notation. Then FEN uses a string of characters like rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/4P3/8/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKBNR b KQkq e3 0 1 to record the state of a game in progress.

When it comes to Zebra 2 (and HZ) patches, I will write something like:

Since Zebra uses dials, I often use 'clock notation' (as in 11oc meaning 'eleven o'clock'). Importantly, when transcribing a patch, such as from a preset pack, I transcribe the patch into notes as above, and then try to reconstruct by reading back the notes, and comparing to the original. Provided the end result sounds good, I am happy. The aim is not to have a perfect recollection from memory of third-party presets, but rather to understand how to make them myself. Taking notes is central to making this process efficient, as it takes seconds to read terse notes above, but minutes to either look through a preset, or watch a youtube video.

Something I also do, following the dogfood philosophy is to recreate patches in a fresh project in Reaper, and then not save my work, so that if I want to 'recall' the patch, the method I use is to recreate from my notes. At first this is hard, but by doing this, you practise creating patches from the init preset (or perhaps a basic template), and also reading from your notes. What you train, you become: if you practise taking and using notes, you get good at taking and using notes; and if you don't, you don't.