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Jumping the gun somewhat I went to the music shop and bought the sheet music for a couple of well known pop tunes.

I can't play them yet, despite their slow tempo and relative simplicity, but one thing struck me straight away - when you've got the music you've got the magic right there in front of you, and you can work the spell all on your own.

With other music your chance of replicating a sound is next to zero since you can't pull together the mixing and production, the same collection of instruments, or even get the same sound from a single instrument - I've got both an ebonite and a metal mouthpiece for my tenor sax and the sounds they produce could be from two different instruments.

But where a song is just a singer and a piano you can press the keys just like they do, and the sound comes out just the same. I spent a good few seconds lining up eight of my fingers to produce the last chord of a song and it was just as spine tingling as the sound coming out of iTunes. Fantastic.

I've discovered that even someone with talent as limited as mine can produce piano music that isn't entirely excruciating.

Armed with volume one of Alfred's Basic Adult Piano Course I raced through the sections on how to find middle-C, through a two-finger version of Good King Wenceslas and a three-finger version of Jingle Bells, before slowing up at the pieces with a tune on the right hand and chords in the left.

My right hand can now produce melodies bursting with fluid expression. My left can be trusted to serve up chord progressions every time. Unfortunately they can't do both at the same time.

I routinely look at my fingers only to see them do the exact opposite of what I'm consciously thinking. Instead I'm finding that the best way to sort them out is to try not to think about it at all. Thinking about one hand or the other is usually better than thinking about both, and I suspect that true mastery comes when you don't think about either hand at all, and listen to the music instead.