Novice musical performers are faced with a complex set of motoric challenges. Novice performers are also faced with conceptual challenges: They need to understand the music that their motor efforts are working to express. But to what extent do novice musicians need to conceptualize music as they acquire musical skill? 93 musical novices (people with no prior musical training and who could not read music) attempted to play a trumpet, recorder, or violin for the first time, while engaging in 1 of 3 different rehearsal strategies to produce their first pitches: (1) playing with no auditory image (just motor rehearsal); (2) hearing the target pitch before attempting to play it (pure auditory image); or (3) hearing and singing the target pitch before attempting to play it (enacted auditory image). Results showed significantly different patterns in novices’ ability to produce accurate pitches depending on the instrument, and instrument specific patterns in the relative advantage one rehearsal style conferred vs. another. Moreover, results also showed that it is not simply a matter of what auditory imagery or motor rehearsal strategy a novice employs in the pursuit of acquiring musical skill, but rather the interaction between mode of rehearsal and the unique motor demands of the instrument being played that affects the accuracy of novices’ first pitches.