The sad thing is, even being told in advance what the melody is, I still have difficulty recognizing it.
Changing the beat, the scale and the chords probably doesn't help.
(Great artists steal. Therefore, theft is great art. This is fallacious, but you get more songs that way.)
Whpearson recently mentioned that people in some other online communities frequently ask "what are you working on?". I personally love asking and answering this question. I made sure to ask it at the Seattle meetup. However, I don't often see it asked here in the comments, so I will ask it:
What are you working on?
Here are some guidelines