| When I got my first bass at age 14, I was completely ignorant to the concept of being in the right key. I just cranked up some Zeppelin and tried my best to play along with the riffs, not even thinking about if the notes actually matched, concentrating on the rhythm and general feel.
A couple of months later I started up a band with a buddy who was a pretty good guitarist and "knew" a lot of the same songs, and after the first couple of minutes of "What f'ing key are you in?!?" he showed me what he meant to match the actual notes and it was like an entirely new world.
This dude, I would suspect, is in a similar place, except that today you can get TAB off the internet. He learned the positions of seeing it written in C without yet understanding what that means. | 
