As a kid growing up, I learned music with the traditional methods. I started at age 10 on the violin, and 11 on the piano. I went through private lessons on both instruments every week, learned to read standard music notation, and was well versed in classical repertoire, although that wasn’t the music I listened to in my daily life.
I participated in symphony orchestras all throughout high school, was in the Tempe Symphony in Arizona, and even received music scholarships to various colleges, which I ultimately turned down to study engineering at Penn State.
When I got to college, classical wasn’t cool, so I decided to teach myself how to play the guitar. I discovered sites like ultimate-guitar.com, and saw how easy it was to learn songs because of guitar tablature, or Guitar Tab for short.