The Importance of an Instructor

I read a lot of forums on piping; it's my way of staying in contact with like-minded people and I get a lot of great advice and suggestions to make this journey easier.  One thing I've noticed is that on a fairly regular basis, someone posts a thread stating that they just bought a set of pipes, and their intention is to pick them up and teach themselves how to play.  There's usually a comment somewhere in the thread about how they play all sorts of instruments without any instruction, how they have a "really good ear", and how they don't need to waste time on a practice chanter or waste money on lessons with an instructor.  This is usually followed with a line or two where they brag about their progress-they have the chanter and drones fully and perfectly tuned and they can play STB start to finish after a week of self taught practice.

If there are indeed people out there with this amazing innate musical talent, I say God Bless and good luck.  However, I seriously doubt that they are as good as they think they are.  I listened to a piper at a rennaisance fair last year who, even to my untrained ear, was horribly out of tune and he thought he sounded pretty good-I know this because I asked him a few pointed questions about his performance and he told me it went really well when it in fact was really poor.  My point is that one of the most important benefits of an instructor is that you have someone with a trained ear who can judge your playing completely without bias and keep you on the right path to proper playing.  My instructor doesn't just teach me new grace notes and tunes, she listens to my playing and hears problems that I don't even know I have.  This keeps me from developing bad habits that I'll have to correct later.

Going to lessons with a good instructor is the best money I can spend.  I've made huge progress even in the short time I've been taking lessons and I intend to continue with lessons as long as I can afford them and my instructor wants to keep me as a student.  Pipers who think they can play well without instruction are fooling themselves and they're selling themselves short.  My question to them would be this-if you have so much natural talent that you can play the pipes straight out of the box, why would you not want to take lessons and become a really stellar piper?