I've been having a go at playing "proper" music!
Delilah (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom-jones/138361.html) seems to come pretty easily. Couple of others I have tried not quite so.
I've been watching what I do with my pitch hand, and even tried a bit of knuckle extensions.
Here a little side-track. I claimed in my first posting to this thread that my ear was untrained. That was, I realise, inaccurate. Rather my ear is not classically trained, but it is trained. I have spent a great deal of my life listening to music, and mostly stuff that you actually have to [i]listen[/i] to, and often stuff that you have to work at getting past the strangeness thereof. Consequently I have a strong feeling for whether a note is right or not for that type of music, but no hope at all of knowing if it is a proper note from a popular scale, let alone naming it.
So, with knuckle extensions I'm not getting that feeling of rightness about the notes. I don't appear to have that much precise control over my hand when making that sort of movement. And why should I - I have never played a guitar, or a violin, have never practised holding chords, which requires movements not that dissimilar to knuckle extensions. Clara Rockmore - violinist. And a lot of other good aerial fingerers too.
So what do I know that involves precise control?
Typing - not much use - for my cluster drone, but little else.
Writing - that's mostly wrist work, and yes, I have been flexing my wrist a bit whilst playing, just for small adjustments - not enough to pull on the muscles of the forearm, which I'll come to in a moment. More importantly from writing I get the pen-holder grip, which stabilises the hand very well.
Shotokan Karate. I attended just enough lessons to learn how to make a basic punch. The appropriate stance is an exaggerated Tai Chi stance. For theremin purposes the Tai Chi a la Peter Pringle stance is more relaxed and preferable. One arm blocks, raised up to shoulder height, ending in a fist, knuckles outermost. The striking arm has its similarly thumb-locked fist by the hip, knuckles facing downwards. In one move the blocking arm is pulled down so it ends in striking arm position, the shoulders twisted and pushed forwards,and the striking fist is pushed forwards, very loose and fast, corkscrewing so that at full extension the knuckles are uppermost. A fraction before full extension the muscles are taughtened so that the full energy of the moving body is transferred through the fast moving fist to the opponent. Then the arm is withdrawn to blocking position ready for the next blow, again the fist rotates 180 degrees.
The key part for my purposes is - the arm is twisted whilst moving to keep the muscles relaxed, allowing very fast, precise movements that are not tiring.
And that is what I have been doing. With my hand by my chest the fingertips are uppermost - at full extension the knuckles face upwards and I might touch the pitch antenna with the tips of my fingers.
Now that I see what I have been doing intuitively I shall try to do it consciously and hence more consistently, until it becomes automatic.
One other thing I have noticed. If I move quickly to the next note I will hit a good one more often that [** edit: not "that" - "than" **] if I move slowly and stop when I hear it.
Does this statement make any sense? - I do better listening to the tune than to the individual notes.
