Good thread. Happy to chime in and hope this helps. I made the tail end of the Racer-X / Shrapnel Era @ G.I.T. Within a few years of my tour of duty out there, I had really respectable chops and played in a busy local cover band. I had a metronome chops workout that I did every day - even on gig days. Admittedly, I struggled with doing anything with my chops that would pass for original or melodic - hence my current non-music career LOL. But I always loved that stye of music and always loved keeping my chops up.
About a year ago, everything gradually but steadily faded - particularly my right hand picking. I could barely tremolo pick on the low E - everything felt clunky for lack of a better term. No amount of practice seemed to help. I still put a guitar across my lap for about an hr each evening in front of the TV and just played what I could.
Now - for reasons I cannot explain - things have started clicking again. Right hand feels steady - even on the heavy wound strings. Hands feel synced up again. Playing is fun again. My thought is that you go through phases: When my chops were sliding, I was dealing with some serious issues at work and the loss of my Dad and lots of time devoted to being present for Mom who continues to struggle. When I was younger playing in a band full time, the ONLY thing in my brain was music. But as you get older, you only have so much unoccupied RAM in your brain and work and life stress can really slow down the processing speed of things like music.
Very interesting, and reflective of some of my experience with age as well.
Only difference is you were good and went to GIT LOL. And went there you had to be able to throw down just to walk in the door.
I was only a big fish in a small pond, that could play fast relative to the other folks in my neck of the woods.
I actually still thought I was good until YouTube became a thing. When I saw 11 year olds in Japan shredding me under the table, reality set in haha.
You bring up an excellent point about being a young fella, and having the time/obsession to burn in technical skill. I have a theory (basically anecdotal crap I made up haha) that to a large degree a player establishes their technical ceiling, at least as far as straight up guitar gymnastics/chops very early on. I think, like in the first 2-3 years of playing.
Obviously practice at any age will lead to improvement, but everyone I know that can play at a higher than average technical level, could do it when they were teenagers.
The ceiling I'm referring to doesn't mean your at your best at an early age, just that it's likely you're establishing how far your technique can go early on, with the hope that you eventually maximize that as you get older.
For instance, I've never met a 30 year old guitar player that always played at a David Gilmour kind of speed, that suddenly decided they wanted to shred, successfully implemented practice etc. and successfully transition to having blazing technique.
Obviously, they can improve and maybe even develop a couple decent parlor trick techniques, but nothing that would approach breaking through their previous 'ceiling.'
I think some of that is because a 30 something dude with a job and a family can't put in the obsessive time like a 14 year old. But I also think there's some pliable aspects to the youthful brain that allow the formation of new skills, where that pliability is majorly diminished in adulthood.
I have zero evidence other than anecdotal observation, and would be very interested in hearing from anyone that has seen a player totally blow away my theory.
Also, there are outliers that are not inhibited by 'the ceiling.' The ones I've seen were high level musicians on other instruments, and they picked up guitar later on and were as good as they wanted to be. And I suppose there would be extremely musically talented individuals that never played an instrument until later on, and they also would likely not be inhibited (I have never personally seen this).
Please forgive my giant deviation haha. To bring it back, I have also experienced technical fall off with age. I was not able to correct it until I had the time and head space where I could prioritize music again. And even then it took (and currently still takes) consistent and intentional practice to get back in gear.
Then there's try to continue improvement/development in my 40's, which is a whole subject by itself.
It’s not just lead stuff, it’s chordal, arpeggio stuff where I mesh two guitars playing different things. I definitely hit a creative peak in my late 20’s.
