There's never a point where any musician can throw up his or her hands and declare, “Okay! I can stop practicing! I know everything now.” Most everyone will agree that honing your chops as a musician is a lifelong effort. If you're just getting started, that truth can make the initial steps seem that much more daunting—so let's put things in perspective.
Every musician's gotta start somewhere, and it might help the ambitious amateurs to know that even the most famous players had humble beginnings. Of course they did, right? Nobody's born a fantastic guitarist or drummer. Serious dedication to improving playing skills is necessary work, no matter who you are.
Read on for five ways that well-known and well-respected musicians first began learning their craft. It's not all about classical training, of course. There's different routes to finding and fine-tuning your skills—and these examples should reassure you that, with the right amount of commitment, any method can lead to incredible results.
So many iconic musicians never took lessons, but instead taught themselves. Jimi Hendrix, Dave Grohl, Joan Jett, Prince, David Bowie—all self-educated. You don't have to start out as a kid, either. Marnie Stern, renowned for her finger-tapping skills, first picked up the guitar at 15, but abandoned it after only a few lessons. It wasn't until her 20s that she really began the process of mastering her instrument.
The experimental no wave scene of 1970s New York inspired Kim Gordon and her Sonic Youth bandmates to see music-making through an artistic lens. This conceptual, more abstract way of both writing and playing likely had a crucial role in shaping the raw, non-conformist style in which she continues to create. To this day, she still does not consider herself a musician in the traditional sense.
Widely considered a guitar virtuoso, Tommy Emmanuel learned how to play from his mother when growing up in Australia. Meg White hadn't even tried drumming before marrying now ex-husband Jack White in the late '90s. He had a spare kit, so she began figuring out her style while simultaneously writing material together.
The Beatles gigged their way to perfection back in the '60s, performing more than 1,200 shows before the Beatlemania craze began. You don't have to start in venues, though. Joni Mitchell and Bessie Smith, two legends of different eras and sounds, both spent a lot of their early years busking in the streets. (Mitchell had played a few clubs in western Canada before busking in Toronto for a while.)
If you can afford to go to music school and think you'd benefit from the education (not to mention the connections and resources), then go for it! Plenty of greats of all genres are formally trained. Just keep in mind that conventional learning, while certainly valuable, doesn't guarantee a style or voice better than that of a self-taught artist. Like any method of learning, where the gained knowledge leads is ultimately up to you and how you apply it.
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Jhoni Jackson is an Atlanta-bred music journalist currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she juggles owning a venue called Club 77, freelance writing and, of course, going to the beach as often as possible.