Gosh, Tom & Buddy. I didn't think of it as a memory test at all. Just shows how people differ, I guess. Sorry 'bout that.
Yes, buddycraigg, I think there's more than hope. I think we have established that you're certainly not schielenkrahe's lost cause. :-)
And speaking of "Happy Birthday", and how people differ, about five months after I started on the theremin I did a little thing which required me to play along to a recording of Happy Birthday.
After a week's practice I still couldn't do it. It wasn't exactly that I kept hitting sour notes - it was that my hand kept wanting to play entirely different notes, and every time I pulled it back to the right note, [i]then[/i] the note went sour. Which was rather embarrassing, because I had persuaded a bunch of other people to do likewise, and from the recordings they were sending me it was clear no-one else found it that difficult.
Eventually I gave in and just let my hand play the tune it wanted to play. It turned out that it wasn't playing an [i]entirely[/i] different tune, just one that was obliquely related, and that kind of worked with the basic melody.
So I learned an important lesson about trusting my instincts when playing and not trying to force my hands to behave themselves.
Seven months on, and my head and my hands now agree pretty much most of the time about what notes to play. We still prefer to play our own strange sort of music rather than other people's tunes, but I'm confident enough to play Happy Birthday on Tuesday to the toughest critics around - a party of six-year-olds!
Who knows - in a few more years I might even be inclined to have a go at The Flower Duet, but at the moment, for me, it doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.
I think my point is - don't sweat it. If you set out with schielenkrahe's very sensible goal of having fun, the rest will fall into place in its own time.
