My entire family is PAINFULLY musical, and I've been surrounded by music since I was -8 months old. Took a bunch of music and chorus classes in school, too.

All in all though, I find that listening to a lot of music in the genre you're working with is the best way to learn.

this question presumes I know music
I have basic music theory from playing guitar

You guys are rad.
I taught myself guitar when I was 11, then bass, then cello, then piano, then synth. I recently got into building guitar pedals and playing with Gameboy, Atari, and NES. I am currently the bassist, lead vocalist, keyboardist, and producer of a neo-psychedelia trio.

I started with the clarinet in the fifth grade. then picked up just about everything else along the way. except for double reed instruments, the flute, piccolo, french horn and baritone sax.

Karate lessons help when somebody tries to rob you after a gig.

Karate can get you quite far in the music industry, actually.

I didn't learn music :'(
Piano lessons seem to be a good start. I wish I had some classic piano years as a child. If only my parents had payed for music lessons instead of this f#ck!ng useless karate

I started play bass at 13, gave up quite quickly and moved onto piano. I got a keyboard for Christmas when I was 13/14 and only really messed around on it every so often, now it's right in front of me, I have to lean over it to type. I spend a lot of time listening to music and attempting to play music, so far I'm not to good at writing music and mostly I just play songs from games using midis. I suppose one of the things that inspired me to try music was that my dad played guitar which I always thought was really cool.

I started off learning the violin when I was 6. Then when I got my C64 when I was about 10 (or 11) I fell in love with the sound and got a program called Electrosound which I used to write basic tunes, and it went on from there to Trackers on the Amiga, to MIDI on the Atari etc. etc. then round robin back to chip...

For me, I've just had music in my life from an early age...

iano those are all excellent points!

10 years of lessons in classical piano.

Excellent points and I think this is true too..learn too much theory and you feel like you have a list of rules to follow. I remember reading in an interview with Radiohead like forever ago, that the other more musically trained members of the band used to try to "protect" Thom Yorke from learning too much about the "rules" of music, since he always brought a unqiue perspective to song writing. I've always tried to hear something in my head and then create it, instead of thinking, I'm gonna use this scale or this type of progression..

i've tried to learn music theory but i've found that comprehend how music and notes works is better.
it's important to comprehend:
- what make a note sound good is not the note itself but the interval (distance in semitones) between the notes around
- the feeling of a scale is given by the sequence of distances between notes
- not every but many scales could be played only whit white keys on a piano, depending on which root note you are starting. modal scales are done in this way.
- A minor scale is the relative minor of C major scale, which means that they share the same notes. this is true for evry modal scale, phrygian G is relative to C magior and so on...
- black keys are scales too, yeah, pentatonic.
- trackers have a fabolous function that not evry intrument have: transpose
- rhythm affects the feeling of the music
- silence is good
- if it sounds good you could break all the rules.

I'd been fucking about with guitar (but couldn't progress because my fingers are mutated or something), drums and casio keyboards... just took it into my head one day fo try and find a way to use a Game Boy as a drum machine, Discovered chip music and got into electronic production from there really. Still learning.

i think it learned me