"General" questions; here's my general comment -
I had the good fortune to start playing (electric gtr and sax) at age 9. Given proximity to the instruments, I also dabbled on flute, drums, and even B3 (my best buddy was being groomed for "church organist"). Fiddle came much later. Being a guitarist and fiddler rendered the mndln pretty much automatic when I got the inclination to play a little bluegrass (but then started down the trad Irish/Scots rabbit hole and everything except the pipes, so mndln got dropped for the most part).
There were a few things that provided me the foundation to do anything I want with music over a lifetime:
- Learning how to play the music I wanted to play from records, from the outset ("ear" training)
- Classical study (this afforded the technique - finger independence - to enable facility on any instrument I picked up)
I never thought about any of it until it started getting ridiculous; when I realized that I had the technical facility, and ear, to play virtually anything. I then began to feel and see music as a whole - an aural phenomenon (still largely unknown, as to its nature, of course); the instruments just tools for rendering sound - all the same as to their function, just different ratios, confiiguration, mechanism, et al. The stylistic, timbral, and organizational aspects being the challenging concerns (for example, studying classical music, you spend endless hours on tonal production). The degree to which someone succeeds with achievement is predicated on the quality of one's hearing - aural discernment, discrimination, "cognition."
As far as shoulds and shouldn'ts, I would suggest developing one's "ear" maximally - there are many ways and methods of going about it, but generally, listening critically to as much diverse sound as possible to improve cognition. The other thing is rhythm - this is the great dependent variable: if you don't possess excellent rhythmic wherewithal, you likely won't get far with music; this is what makes musicians, musicians.
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