Hey, there's an inspirational story there. Thanks!
I think your personal experience holds true in a lot of domains: start with something small you can wrap your head around, and then expand outward from there.
I think your personal experience holds true in a lot of domains: start with something small you can wrap your head around, and then expand outward from there.
There is definitely a change in the brain that happens if you are heavily exposed to playing an instrument or otherwise making music at and before 11 to 12 years of age. Adults who do not have this are handicapped like they are missing some sort of sense. The difference is like the difference between an immigrant's adopted language and that same language as spoken by their children.
The former can work really, really hard and speak quite fluently and have the grammar and most of the accent tamed as to speak very elegantly and understandably, but they almost never get rid of the last vestiges of that accent.
If you want your children to truly learn music, then hang out with and have fun with people who do music effortlessly and for the sheer fun of it. This means that you go to jam sessions at private houses. Anything that remotely smells like a performance won't work the same way. Expose them to music done purely for the fun of it.
If you want to learn music as an adult, you have to learn how to hear again. The immigrant in the first example can think he's speaking perfectly, even though native speakers clearly hear that he is not. You have to learn how to hear again. You have to become directly aware sound stimulus, unfiltered through the higher-level notions you've developed about it. Then you have to correlate that with what happens when you manipulate your instrument. Keep doing that for 3 to 5 years.
I should add that, while I was exposed to music at an early age, I didn't really take joy in it until I discovered Irish Traditional music at the age of 19. I knew back then, that it would be impossible for me to accomplish much. I just thought if I could learn just this one tune. Then I learned a second tune. Then I went through a period of time when I was feverishly listening to tapes of myself and comparing what I heard myself play to recordings of masters for 8 hours a day sometimes. Eventually, I got good enough to teach at a school for Irish Music in the US and even qualified to compete at the Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann, which is basically the world competition.
My journey was two decades. The sooner you start, the more time you have to enjoy fluency!