Here's Aang! His story is actually based off of my mom's cousin, who can do the exact same thing I have Aang doing here. I figured since, as the Avatar, he can bend all four elements, as a normal kid he could play a ton of instruments. Also, in the show it portrays as being a tiny bit of a slacker and susceptible to his own awesomeness (but who isn't susceptible to Aang's awesomeness?). Anyways, here it is.
Aang was twelve when his parents died in a fire, and with no relatives to go to he was put in foster care and shunted from home to home until he was fifteen. A dozen different homes in three years, and they all blurred together until he could barely separate one from the other in his mind. A few stuck out, of course. There was the one where the little neighbor girl had a crush on him, the one where the old lady tried to feed him cat food (he stayed with her for all of two days), the one where the two older boys beat him up for fun.
Then there was the one where he was "discovered." At least, that's what Gyatso, his foster father, said. Aang had always known, but he had been in so many different homes in the past years that no one had noticed the fact that he could play almost any instrument he laid his hands on. He just understood the noises the instruments made and how to coax these sounds out of them. He knew what he was doing without any help, just understood. Gyatso found him after he had kidnapped Kuzon's guitar - Kuzon and Bumi were two other boys that Gyatso had adopted, both a year older than Aang. Kuzon took guitar lessons, and Aang had to hold in his laughter every time he showed them what he had learned. Aang needed no lessons.
And he had to admit he was a little - okay, really a lot - prideful when Gyatso found him and Aang explained how he'd always been able to figure instruments out by just holding them. Guitar was his favorite, though, guitar and singing. Kuzon was resentful that his new brother (Gyatso had finished up the adoption process a month after discovering Aang's talent) was suddenly so talented, and Aang had lorded it over him until Gyatso found out about it. He had been severely chastised and grounded for a month.
Though apologetic, Aang could not get over his certainty that, as a musical prodigy, the world would simply be handed to him on a platter; as it was, he would have never completed high school if Gyatso hadn't been on his back about it constantly. Even so, he was amazed to find that, with his test scores, only a handful of colleges would even accept him, and none would give him any sort of scolarship, musical or otherwise.
None, accept some tiny college halfway across the country called Atla Music College. He was accepted, and he had to work two jobs to be able to pay for tuition. That, on top of band practice with his new friends, and he almost made himself sick from exhaustion.
Still, when he was twenty-two and picked up his guitar after leading Toph to her keyboard, he had to admit that all the hard work had paid off.
And he loved it.