I &heart; music

There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Music is among my top 5 things that I enjoy in life. I'm almost constantly listening to music, and I'm sort of proud of my variety of listening choice. The thing I like the most about music is how it can influence me. That's especially cool because if I need to concentrate, if I need to relax, get pumped up for something, or just zone out, there's a specific genre that I can pick up and within 2 songs, I'm already in the zone. Sometimes it takes longer, but it's usually pretty quick.

Pandora Radio is my weapon of choice in the matter. I have a slurry of stations defined, mostly by specific song seed and then thumbs up and down to fine tune the rest. The cool thing is once I put on the station and it's tuned correctly, then it can go for hours on the same theme with little to no repeats depending on the station / genre.

Recently I also got myself a new set of headphones and I'm almost in love. They're ear buds, they have little sleeves that tune down outside noise, they have great bass for their size, & they have the iPhone mic / button gizmo giving me the hardware pause button I have been lacking. Best part is they work well with my motorcycle helmet. I hadn't actually gotten a chance to try them out on the road, but at home just trying them on seemed to work well.

My favorite genre of music by far has to be techno, specifically trance. Given music and a skilled DJ, the music can go on seamlessly for hours. You can choose to listen to it, or just let it play in the background. There's no positive messages, no negative messages, just good feelings. The only bad comments I can really empathize with against techno is the repetitiveness. I guess I'm just that boring of a person. On the other side, there's actually a music theory discussion behind that position that I'm a big supporter of. If music moves too fast, and I don't mean the beat, then the act of moving and the additional music loses its importance. Meanwhile if you stay in the same general area of a key or idea, then moving away from it holds that much more weight. It's easier to tease and entertain the listener in my opinion than to just constantly bombard the listener with music that's all over the place. This is especially true for a musical style that's meant to last for longer than 3-4 minutes at a time.

After that, I'm a relatively big fan of rock, alternative, a good portion of punk / grunge, "popular" rap / r&b, mainstream country, classical, experimental (at least once), and most anything that can be made on a c64.

p.s. title is on purpose