I've started to do some ear training to recognize different intervals. To help prioritize, and just out of curiosity, I wanted to see which intervals were most common (and which were least common). So here are the results I got from looking at 30 songs on my "want to learn" list (mostly rock or rock-adjacent music from the late 60s through the 80s, but some other stuff too), and just counting up how many instances of different intervals I encountered. I looked at 5 successive intervals per song from the vocals, and another 5 from an instrumental solo, ending up with 150 intervals (30 songs X 5 intervals) for each. The distribution of intervals was pretty similar for both, so in the histogram below I added them together. Ascending intervals are shown as rising from the horizontal axis; descending intervals are shown as decreases from the horizontal axis.

I also thought that there might be a different distribution for the first 2 notes and the last 2 notes of songs so I looked at the interval between the first and second, and the penultimate and final note for each song as well (the latter was a bit more challenging than I expected because most songs I have recordings of fade out rather than end so in some instances I had to just make a decision about what sounded it like it could be the final note. I can't figure out how to embed more than 1 pictures so I will put those data in a 2nd post.

Also, I should note that I tend to like songs with melodic solo's more than fast, generally less melodic, sometimes shreddy type solo's, so that may have biased the results.

For both solo's and lead lines, the most common intervals between non-unison notes were major 2nd and minor 3rd, followed by flatted second, then perfect 4th, and then major 3rd and perfect 5th intervals. The remaining intervals (tritones and anything greater than a perfect 5th) were very infrequent. So this makes me feel that for starters, I should focus on recognizing everything up to a perfect 4th, and also a perfect 5th. It also makes me think I should include both ascending and descending interval examples of those intervals.