We all have a few of those childhood dreams that fell to the wayside as we grew up. We were either too busy or too involved in something else or were too poor or just kept forgetting about it. It doesn’t matter why we never learned to play the instruments that we wanted to, what matters is that now that we’re adults, are we going to learn to play the musical instruments we dreamed of?
While shopping for the musical instruments of our dreams, we keep running across the “learn to play” instruments and book sets. They look like they were probably designed for kids, but the instruments look like they are almost high quality enough to get away with playing. So can anyone really learn to play a musical instrument from the “learn to play” series?
To be honest, those who learned to play at least one musical instrument as a child most likely can learn to play another musical instrument form the “learn to play” series provided we at least learned the basics of reading music. Being able to at least read the basic scale from sheet music will help tremendously when trying to learn to plat a musical instrument from a book.
Some people do very well learning to play musical instruments from a book, but the people who do very well all have one thing in common, they are self learners. Those of us who were born in the mid to late seventies and beyond grew up in a system of education that everything was handfed to us, thus the majority of us do not learn very well on our own. We need someone to hold our hands and teach us note by note to play a musical instrument, not to mention trying to learn other things. Learning to play a musical instrument from a book requires a certain amount of self teaching ability.
Without the ability to “figure things out along the way,” learning to play a musical instrument from a book will prove to be quite frustrating, although it can most certainly be done. If our desire is strong enough and our patience can run fairly deep, then yes, we can learn to play a musical instrument from a book.
There are few things quite as satisfying as accomplishing something like the challenge of learning to play a musical instrument from a book. As we learn to play any musical instrument without the guidance of someone else, just like kids, our confidence grows. For adults, learning to play a musical instrument from a book may very well be the realization of a childhood dream, and there’s nothing but pure magic in that.