Yeah, i know about Django Rhinehart training himself after he lost parts of his fingers as well iirc.
But, it's not just parts of fingers that is the problem, it's like, the whole spring-y sense of my hands are gone, they are quite stiff and feel 'bunged up' with crap, the fact is, i just can't play as fluidly as i did before.
i basically ****ed them up by my overconsumption of marajuana, i was depressed and self medicating with it, and the stuff i was buying was only about 22percent mj, the rest made up of solid crap like tyres and rubber and crap, so over the years my hands just went all stiff.
mj is not good in general, if you overdo it, as it attacks your bones, so it was a combo of that and all the crap in the stuff i was buying, cause i was not smoking it, i was eating it, cooking it into yogurts.
So, aye, i was not the greatest guitarist b4 that, but that was cause i did not practice, but even if i practised now, i could only play so far and my left hand couldn't take me past a certain level due to it feeling all stiff.
i would probably go back to it if i could get that remedied, i always wanted to be able to actually be able to play very wel, i was just too ****ed up back then to put in the effort.
i mean, i did sit and play the guitar a lot in the 90s, but i mainly sat and wrote songs, recording them into my four track, trying to write new ones for the band, instead of researching new techniques etc.
edit: I can still play, but just not as slickly and i know there are things i can't do now that i could've before, mainly lead guitar stuff, like, there was a riff on our last record that i could not get down as slickly as i wanted, it still has a little glitch in there, but i couldn't get it down perfect due to the stiffness, so just had to make do with the best take i could get.
and there is a guitar solo on our first record i got down very slickly, and could not play it back live quite as slickly as i did ten years before.
so, if there are these simple guitar lines i can't reproduce nowadays, there is no way my guitar playing could progress beyond what i could play back then, with the state my hands are on nowadays.