Mike O'Cull

My favorite of the KC catalog. Would recommend.

Treat your first band as a learning experience, not your ticket to stardom. Learn how rehearsals work. Learn how to play with other musicians. Learn how to be someone people want to play with. The rest can come later. #LearnGuitarMalta #BandLife #Guitarists

Shredmill

@ScottWalkerSong I had one for a while. Lots of fun to be had.

@MikeOCull I’m wrapping my head around the b-bender. That’s been another world to explore.

Had a good guitar practice session again today. I’m still playing the Tele in G tuning, which definitely fuels my enthusiasm. I find the sound of Open G to be pure and refreshing. The hardest thing to do with it is not fall into all the Keith stuff. There are other sounds in there but you have to dig for them.

@davpajaro No, I’m no good at slide. Strictly freehand. lol

@MikeOCull cool, do you play slide in that tuning?

@SluggerToodloo No, I’m terrible at slide.

@MikeOCull using a slide?

@divertedcourse I understand. What hit me was how cocaine-influenced some of it sounds. Very hyper and aggressive.

@MikeOCull As much as I like his playing and the performances on that album, the whole thing is way too slick for me. The production with the sheen. I need my blues dirtier. Too sterile.

I’m listening to Couldn’t Stand The Weather for the first time in a while tonight. Nobody sounds like this live in the studio anymore. You can’t get that kind of feel and energy by tracking remotely. Makes me want to practice harder.

@SteamboatSun22 Yeah, that’s one of my all time favorites. We were blessed to come up in a time with actual talent playing on the radio.

@MikeOCull Just listened to talking heads stop making sense live. Amazing. Brings me back to the concert at Red rocks in the 80s.

I challenge everyone that see's this post to just hit the re-post button. Let's see what happens. @TomsPedalDemos" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">youtube.com/@TomsPedalDemos

I’m a musician. Of course I’m a narcissist. lol

@DouglasSimon22 Super cool! Slide fiddle sounds like an innovation to me!

@MikeOCull I found a 1K violin the other day for $43. This is one thing I don't play. I wonder if I ever will. My sausage fingers already make me wanna try it with a glass slide. I know I can hit notes with a slide 😀

Playing an instrument is just about the only pure thing left to do. To become someone who can pick up an instrument, any instrument, and play it, you have to walk the path. That’s it. Full stop. You start with nothing but desire. You learn and practice until you get better. There’s never been any other way. Playing a physical instrument is something the modern world hasn’t been able to corrupt yet. It hasn’t found a way to allow someone to do it who hasn’t done the work. You can’t hack it. You can’t buy it. You can’t even negotiate with it. You have to do it for yourself. You have to put yourself into the process. You can, of course, create music in a computer program or with AI but that’s not the same thing, is it? Those methods require little to nothing from the creator. Becoming proficient on an actual instrument requires desire, discipline, courage, confidence, humility, pain, and time. Lots of time. I’ve never met anyone who made songs with AI until their fingers bled. THE PURITY TEST I think the purity of the effort will always attract certain people to music. There’s an internal satisfaction to it that beats just about anything. The effort also weeds out all non-hackers who don’t pack the gear needed to join the band. The first year of playing an instrument is long, slow, and painful. You really gotta want it. I’ve seen many students decide that the guitar simply wasn’t for them. WHERE DO WE GO NOW? What learning to play really leads to, pass or fail, is deeper knowledge of the self, of who you really are. It’s a transformative experience. It makes you confront all your internal stuff. Music, like all the humanities, has to exist outside of our computers. We can never forget that the journey of learning is the whole point of it. It’s about who we become along the way. The person who succeeds isn’t the same person who took their first lesson. They’ve grown, expanded themselves, tested their limits, conquered frustration, and become more than they were before. Attaining the combination of skill, knowledge, and soul needed to be a musician is one of the most profoundly human things anyone can do. This is why music, along with painting, sculpture, writing, and dance, will always matter. No other creatures besides us are capable of these things. Human-ities, get it? These are the God-Givens. They’re the evidence of the Secret Sauce, the gifts of the Holy Ghost that make us fundamentally different from all other beings.

@HardmanSco50996 I do, too.

@MikeOCull It's only rock & roll. I miss Charlie. 😔

I put my Tele into Open G tuning today in honor of the new Stones record coming out. It felt like the right thing to do. Big fun was had. lol

@rented_mule1951 That I don’t know. Keef definitely taught it to the world.

@MikeOCull Did Phil Everly teach open G tuning to Kef?

@Long_Tom1776 They say it drops at midnight.

@MikeOCull New Stones record?

@JDittyDesign I understand. Open G was a big knowledge breakthrough for me. It opened up a lot of sounds.

@MikeOCull First time in open G was like the clouds parting. I now keep a Tele set up just for it!

@mamberg1 I didn’t. I guess I’m the one weirdo who uses that low string in G tuning. I’d set up another Tele as a five string just out of respect if God sent me one. G is my favorite open tuning.

@MikeOCull did you take off the (former), E string???