I was raised in one of those freaky music families. Dad was a composer/arranger/clarinetist and Mom was an expert flutist. There was a saxophone lying around the house unused so I decided that I would play that. I took the approach many of you are on right now: learning the basics in middle school band camp, jumping to private lessons and from there, shooting ahead of my peers into advanced instruction in college. My middle/high school instructor was a maniac, pitching fits and knocking over music stands when I didn’t play the etude just perfectly. My college instructor was a zen Buddhist who thought everything was “just fine, dude.” My approach is somewhere in the middle. I take music very seriously, because if you can’t play well, then you’ll never enjoy it as much as you will when you CAN play well. However, I realize that there’s more to life than sitting in a practice room grinding away on scales for eight hours a day. So yes, I’ll see that you work hard at it. I’ll insist you practice and I’ll push you to be better than you think you can. But I probably won’t knock over a music stand if you miss that grace note.