Criteria for choosing Associative Repertoire

In order to choose the strongest candidates for your AR, use the following criteria:

1. Familiarity is the most important quality to seek. Nursery rhymes, TV themes from your
childhood, annoying “earworms”, music from ads that can never forget (even though you
wish you could) are all excellent candidates
2. Genre is not of any importance at all. So if you are a jazz player, don’t feel compelled to seek
out just jazz tunes unless they meet criteria from #1 above
3. Look to use only the very first tones of the melody. Resist the urge to use the first bar of the
bridge, the 5th bar of the A section etc.—it’s important that your musical mind not have to
“fast forward” through the tune to get to the useful part.
4. Be careful that the opening interval is not some kind of throwaway pickup figure. See the
example below for clarification: <ex>
5. Avoid consulting published lists of intervals—at least at first. Many lists provide tunes that
don’t meet the criteria above. Also, the mere act of trying to find the tunes in your own
memory is an ear training exercise itself. Invariably, the tunes that you can recall without
consulting a list will prove to be sturdier than some half-remembered song you got from a
list.

Work on this for about a week—try hard to ransack your brain. Play or sing the target interval
and then try to search your memory for a “hit”. Even after working on this for a week, it’s highly
likely that there will gaps in your list; particularly in the case of the larger descending intervals.
This is normal. At this point, you can consult the lists—starting with those in the appendix of this
book and expanding to the internet if you are still stuck. Just remember, that many of these lists
on the internet are suitable for our purposes.