Mhhh, I think, therefore I am... sort of the worst of the two or three worlds
My dad was self taught on piano. Never had any lessons but severely crippled by polio at the age of 5, the family "pianola" was all he had, aside from an impeccable ear. He heard a song on the radio, once, sat down at the piano and played with all the key changes etc. Years of "on the job training" will do that to you and his on the job training was playing piano in the silent movie theaters. That gives you an idea of the time we are talking about.
Of course his dream was to provide his children with the best musical education. My sister (two years older) gave her first piano concert at the age of 5, when I just learned to walk upright. My parents let me mature a little bit longer and got me into piano lessons around 5-ish, so kind or 4 years behind my sister in terms of instructions. There were two things that doomed me, one was we had the same piano teacher who ended each session with the remark: "if you were only as talented as your sister ... " and the other was that I used to be (still am, sort of) totally dyslexic to the point where I had to ask my sister to read me some books paragraph by paragraph and I would try to make sense of the mumbo jumbo of characters, paragraph by paragraph,
But sheet music to this day is a glorified Rohrschach test to me.
Bottom line, my first musical education ended sort of catastrophic. Going back to
@Dr G and his first guitar. My dad became a very successful attorney and one of his clients was the owner of a string instrument "factory". The client was insolvent and offered a cello in lieu of cash. Putting on my best Nicholas Cage impression, I swear it was probably the worst cello ever produced but I was the victim of the circumstances and, thence, forced to take cello lessons. I loved my cello teacher, a student of Paul Hindemith and I even named my cat Benedikt after him but give a student the instrument from hell and watch him fail. Luckily, a bad skiing accident leaving me in a stretcher for a few months ended my second not-self-taught musical endeavor.
There is one thing that I am going to throw in here because everybody now takes YouTube and books for granted. There weren't any of those materials available at the time. If you were lucky you could get the sheet music for your instrument but could you listen to most of the pieces being performed? Hell no! That just did not exist.
Willem DeFesch: Cello concert in Eb, it's not even now on YouTube or Deutsche Grammophon.
I found Francesco Tenaglia's Aria, beautiful piece of baroque music, like 50 years after I abandoned my cello, which, one night, mysteriously, simply exploded, I mean just developed a crack and split in two pieces and I had nothing to do with it, I had a love-hate relationship with it but I would never harm it.
Next step: kind of overlapping with the cello, a class mate sold his acoustic guitar for 10 Deutschmark (about $2.-) and I snatched it. I had a little experience with guitars even if I did not own one from a summer boarding school where somebody played a guitar and showed me to play blowing in the wind.
I played that guitar until my fingers bled - a $2 guitar will do that to you pretty fast. And then, another day at school I broke the ring finger of my left hand playing basket ball. But somebody told me about Django Reinhardt and what he could do with two fingers only. I started finger- picking and once the cast came off my left hand... Self taught all the way. I mean, literally, stuck in a room with nothing to go on with other than an old guitar. In retrospect, it feels a bit like the experience of Dr. B in the Chess Novella, a.k.a. The Royal Game.
I ended up a decent session rhythm guitar player and a few solo gigs including a lot of originals. And then I got married....
The end.
p.s. After a 30 year hiatus, 5 days before my divorce was finalized I saw an ad for a used sax on Craigslist. I was ripped off by the seller but eventually I made it work, never had any lessons other than another sax player at an acid jazz jam telling me "monkey see, monkey do", that is, standing in front of me and asking me to imitate his fingering.
But now there is YouTube, BetterSax, Dave Pollack, Nigel, Adrienne Spencer, Scott Paddock and who knows.
Self-taught has a very different meaning now compared to 50 or 60 years ago. I am thinking about taking lessons now, though
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