I've been playing for seven years and i'm still shit (i'm 23). Ouch. : P
The only reason why I'm progressing so fast is because I went nuts and wanted to be as good as John Petrucci one day. Maybe in another 20 years... I just practice whenever I can (weekends and at 5:00am before I head off to school). I can't wait until summer so that I can practice more and record some music. I'm in the IB Programme at Strawberry Crest High School in Florida (nerd program), so I struggle to find time to practice. I'm also collabing with 2 (maybe 3) people on separate Balloon Party tracks. I've never tried songwriting before, so this is a new chalenge. One requires me to play a solo over a dubstep track (weird combination, but awesome), and a progressive metal track about Princess Luna (I know that somepony else already did something similar). I'm not sure about the third one. When I'm finished, I'll upload them to my youtube page (located in the signature) and make one more song for Balloon Party. After all of that, I'm going to relax and do some fanfiction readings for a few weeks in the beginning of June.
When I said good, I didn't mean that I was the best, just fairly decent and improving. It's not like I'm going to bust out shredding some Steve Vai perfectly...
I'm actually not amazing at improvising, so I usually practice a lot before trying anything new. I hope that makes you feel better.
Writing music and collaborating with other musicians is new to me, so all of you are probably better overall musicians than I am.
When I said I play metal, I mean any style of it that I can. My personal favorite is progressive metal (in the style of Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, Between the Buried and Me, Protest the Hero, Animals as Leaders, Opeth, Liquid Tension Experiment, etc.). Recently, I've been trying some djent (like Periphery and Bulb), deathcore (Whitechapel, IWrestledABearOnce, Veil of Maya), death metal (Cannibal Corpse, Death, Bloodbath), and grindcore (mostly just Carcass style: pre- Heartwork, and some Pig Destroyer).
I'm always open to new genres of music. I just have a preference for metal. Outside of metal, I've tried hard rock, jazz, psychadelic rock, and some classical. When I try combining these styles of music with metal, I usually wind up with progressive metal anyways. Just add some bizzare (sometime dissonant) chords, awkward time signatures, polyrhythms, solos for every instrument in the band, uncommon song structures, instrumental interludes, and finally (my favorite part), chromatic notes galore for riff, leads, solos, and transitions.
I also try to keep a decent foundation of music theory so that I know what I'm doing.
Also, almost every other guitarist out there has better equipment anyways. I'll save money to buy my own when I'm finally old enough to legally have a job in the state of Florida.
By the way, my new youtube account for brony music, fanfics, and other random stuff (later on) is right there below this. You could subscribe and wait until June to get in on this. I will always be open to feedback and suggestions on anything.