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10/28/2015 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

The Top 5 Motorcycle Songs

Music and motorcycles go together like peanut butter and jelly: they're good on their own but once put together they are like heaven. A good selection of songs to listen to when riding can really enhance a road trip and even help you to get more out of the experience. Sound good? If you're ready to make a playlist for your next trip, here are our top 5 motorcycle songs:

#5 - Byrds: Wasn't Born to Follow

Although this song isn't really about motorcycles, it is from the soundtrack from the movie Easy Riders, which makes it ideal for a long distance road trip. The lyrics to this song are ideal for those true free-spirited riders, who refuse to follow the crowd, and lead when they're on the road.

#4 - The Hondells: Little Honda

Although this is actually a song by The Beach Boys, The Hondells did a pretty good job of covering the song for them. And, since it is about a Honda, well that just makes it a great song for a motorcycle road trip. This song makes us think of riding a motorcycle being innocent fun back in the 60s. It also serves us a friendly reminder of how much the sport of motorcycle riding has grown since then.

#3 - Love and Rockets: Motorcycle

This song is all about the love of motorcycles so it is just fitting that it would make the list. It is more about the motorcycle rider's feelings and how much they love their bike and riding in general. With the lyrics â€˜I feel warm inside, on the motorbike, the wind is all around, on the motorbike, we are free', does anything more need to be said?

#2 - Wheels of Steel: Motorcycle Man

Motorcycle Man by Saxon is from the album Wheels of Steel, and was released in 1980. What better song to make a motorcycle list than this since you get to hear the engine roar of a motorcycle in it? The band who sings this song introduced everyone to the new wave of British heavy metal bands, and the song gives you a pure adrenaline rush making it the perfect tune for a long road trip.

#1 - Twisted Sister: Live to Ride, Ride to Live

This song is from Twisted Sister's 1983 album, You Can't Stop Rock and Roll. The lead singer of the band, Dee Snider is an avid motorcycle rider and has done many a ride to benefit his local food bank. You can't beat the motorcyclists who ride for charity!

Now that you know the top 5 motorcycle songs to listen to while riding your motorcycle, it's time to get some gear from your favorite motorcycle store NYC and plan your road trip. These songs

are guaranteed to get your heart pumping and your adrenaline going once you hit the gears on your sweet hog. There are, of course, more songs you can listen to but if you want to take the ultimate road trip on your bike, you can't beat any of the above.

10/29/2012 By Jason Bean Leave a Comment

Saxapella – Popular Music Hits Played All by Saxophone

My brother, as well as other saxophone playing friends will probably enjoy this one. This guy’s name is Alex Mathias and he’s combined some of my favorite qualities of recent acapella music and other groups of layers upon layers or audio work to create a very complex arrangement of a song by one artist. The first artist that comes to mind that does this is Mike Tompkins, but also frequently done by one of my other favorite groups, Pomplamoose.

Instead of putting it all together with his voice or different instruments, Alex does it all with saxophones. All sounds in the recording are done in some way with a saxophone. He calls is Saxapella.

The basic premise is that I play cover songs of popular music, including Somebody I Used To Know and Thriller but solely using multiple saxophones – between 30 and 40 tracks of saxophones. I also create drum sounds just using key noises and breath noises through the sax. It is a very unique project and the videos are very funny. Here is the link to Thriller, where I even create ‘howling’ sounds with the saxophone:

Here’s a video of him performing Michael Jackson’s classic horror hit, Thriller:

10/12/2012 By Jason Bean 1 Comment

How to Smartly Stream Media to Your Dumb Devices

I’ve had a little device at my house for a few weeks now and I’ve finally gotten around to installing it, which took just a few minutes, and enjoying the features it provides. The device is a wireless media stick from HSTI products. I was sent one for review and I’ve got to say I’m pretty impressed with just how easy it was to get configured and using it.

You may be aware that many of the newer electronic devices in your home and specifically your living room have USB ports that will allow you to share photos, videos or music that’s stored on a thumb drive. The problem with that scenario is that if your AV stack in your living room is like mine, getting around to access these ports (frequently in the back of the device) can be a bit of a challenge. And, unless you’ve got a really large USB thumb drive, you’d probably like to refresh the content on that drive that you’d be sharing.

That’s where the Wireless Media Stick solves this problem. You see, instead of it being a thumb drive, it’s really a wireless receiver that impersonates being a USB thumb drive to your device. Instead of there being any actual storage on the drive, it connects wirelessly to your laptop, desktop or network storage device and shares whatever shared drive you setup with the device as the source of files for you AV component.

Many years ago, the big rage at Christmas was digital picture frames. Many of these devices had USB ports for connecting the thumb drive for new images. With the HSTI Wireless Media Stick, you can continually share new photos to the photo frame without changing out drives and swapping photos.

As I said, I was really impressed with just how easy it was to configure the device. You basically plug it into your computer. Follow the wizard prompts for connecting to your wireless network and then specify what folders you want to share. Remove the device from your computer and plug it into the device you’re going to use it with to share media. The device will go through its normal steps to identify the device and when it does you should see the different folders of files you shared with it during the initial setup and configuration.

In my personal test I was quickly able to watch a slideshow of files from my laptop on my 42″ TV screen with a musical background of MP3’s being shared from another folder on my laptop. Very cool.

Don’t worry about running out of room. The stick has a limit of only being able to access a 1TB of data and has the top limit of 4GB for an individual file. But since you can get most movies now available in a compressed digital format, all of these that I’m aware of are less than 4GB each. The other nice feature available is that there’s an app for your Android phone as well. So if you car stereo has a USB port for media, you could stream media stored on your phone straight to your car stereo.

If you’d like to purchase one of these little devices, I’m sure you’ll love it. Especially coming up for the holiday season. This would easily let you setup a slideshow on your TV for the holidays while family is over and you can see all those family photos from the year and put them to some holiday music background. Or, you could just stream a little looping video file of a fireplace to display on your large screen, HDTV.

Just click on the image below (it’s an affiliate link) and let me know what you think if you pick one up for yourself.

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