I've Been "Playing" Guitar On And Off For ~25 Years And I Suck

I've basically wasted 25 years of progress by never properly practicing and basically just sloppily learning songs I wanted to learn. All I pretty much do these days is poorly play early lamb of god songs.

I've got ADHD and it has not helped - I get easily distracted/bored. I've tried some stuff in the past online; I signed up for Pebber Brown for a bit because he seemed quite good and a lot of people recommended him. He kind of sucked the fun out of the instrument and I found him to be fairly rude and unpleasant.

I recently decided to learn Stairway to Heaven (the opening part, at least) and it opened my eyes to the fact that I can barely change chords without having to pause and get the fingering down. That is how bad I am after 25 years of on and off "playing". I've always just played riff type stuff (because I love it) and powerchords.

I can play some songs from start to finish; but very few. Like I said - I mostly just learn Lamb of God songs these days... But most of them are too fast for me, so I stick to the slower ones and they almost all have parts that I still cannot play. Over the years it's been pretty much all metal stuff - Metallica, Lamb of God, Gojira, Iron Maiden, etc... But I mostly had to learn bits and pieces that I could play. Many songs I can play if I slow it down to 90%, but there's that wall where I just never get faster. Lamb of God's 11th Hour is a good example for me with this. At 90% I've got it (until half way through when it seems to speed up) but I cannot get to speed; my elbow starts to hurt and my shoulder gets tense. I know it's doing it, but I can't figure out how to relax it.

I don't really have time right now for lessons; so those are out right now... But I want to get on track and start to learn to play properly. I'm just not sure where to start at. I almost feel like I need to start over at the beginning. I'm that bad. There are so many sites and stuff out there - I'm not sure what to trust or where to really begin. I feel like I need to basically hit the reset button.

submitted by /u/Wizzykin67
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