I started to put this in the "Which high school/college class was most useful" thread until I realized it would have been more appropriate in a discussion called "What skill has given you the most pleasure?" Have to be musicianship, hands down.

I dabbled with violin and trumpet in elementary school. But in high school I was a member of a large (120 voice) award-winning a capella choir as well as smaller vocal ensembles composed of selected members of the larger choir. I sang second tenor and learned to read fluently for voice along with basic music theory.

In my senior year, while not officially enrolled, I picked up the double bass (the orchestra was led by the choir leader) and learned to read for bass, which has helped me to competently play as a church accompanist ever since. Oddly, I can play jazz and classical bass from charts, but I don't seem to have what it takes as a rock bassist.

After being discharged from the Army I attended a private school in New Orleans, where I studied piano and music theory. I think I went for less than two years, so I ended up musically semi-literate. I can read with much difficulty for keyboard and not at all for guitar. (It wasn't much of a school, and I wasn't much of a student.)

My primary instrument has always been guitar, on which I am almost entirely self taught. I picked it up during the summer of 1966 before my first year of high school. Two years later someone showed me how to fingerpick and I was off to the races. I have owned an electric since getting out of high school but didn't really consider myself an electric guitarist until getting seriously into BIAB in 2005. This despite the fact that I had played in bands for years as a pretty good rhythm guitarist and a so-so lead. I have taken a few lessons along the way, usually until I realized that I knew about as much as the teacher. (That would have been different had I studied classical guitar, of course.)

So throughout my life I have been in school and church choirs and bands as well as playing as a solo singer-songwriter and in various rock and blues bands that never went anywhere. Most of it was great fun, but it has taken me until relatively recently--through the use of BIAB--to consider myself a 'contender.' If I had it to do over again I'd definitely go the classical route on guitar, even though I consider myself a blues-rocker (it worked for Eddie Van Halen) and learn some more tricks on bass.

"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."