////"Just my opinion, I am by no means a music scholar. I am an education major though, and for the folks talking about learning to play the instrument before reading music, we call it "sound before symbol" and it is universally accepted among educators   :)"////

Overall, I'm going to have to disagree with this. It would depend on the instrument. Guitar I'm completely self-taught. Never took a lesson. Taught myself to read the music.

Drums I took lessons and am much better for it than I would have been without it. But I could have learned drums ok.

Bass guitar, same as guitar, but having seen what my instructor can do with a bass guitar, I have to rethink my position that I play well for being self-taught. He makes a bass do things I never heard anyone do. He makes beautiful full chords--really pretty sounding. So I may take lessons from him for that but GOD all these years of bad technique I'll have to undo.

That brings me to my point: to play an instrument without knowing what you're doing can be damaging because you incorporate bad techniques that become so ingrained that it becomes a huge struggle trying to get rid of them to play properly.

I was teaching myself the double bass for a while and I was getting to be fairly proficient but I started taking lessons and thank god I did before I went too much longer. My techniques were SO bad that I never could have progressed much farther than I already had. And I had no idea how to use the bow at all. This instrument is so full of secrets that you're not going to learn them all if you aren't properly initiated and even then...Few people could figure it out without help.

The other thing is that I want to learn these techniques because they are handed down from Europe from over a century ago from Franz Simandl--the foremost bass pedagogue. I want to carry on his tradition. I'm not interested in blazing my own path because it would have been a dreadfully short one. I'll walk Simandl's path because it will take me far then maybe I can think about blazing my own path. But for now, I want to do it his way. He knews what he's talking about, I don't. I was groping and sinking. But at least I knew it.