Education - Karaoke

Please use these guides to develop your own show

Karaoke

Karaoke is using video and music to entertain, people who would like to sing can with the benefit of having the words on the screen

You will need software and practice - Virtual DJ does Karaoke well and its straight forward to use (other software is available)

You will need at least 1 mic but 2 are better, don’t let the public use expensive microphones as they wont care if the abuse your kit

You will also need  a comprehensive collection of music as people will expect that you have everything that ever existed

More speakers are damaged by a mic than than playing music as often singers will shout or scream causing the signal to peak - red lining the speaker can cause the horns to blow or worse, so keep an eye on the output at the speaker not the mixer

Just like doing discos beware of the football songs - the guests can not only sing the song but they can change the words

There are two basic forms of karaoke

1     Uncle Jimmy want to sing at a party - why not offer to provide a backing track with the words, using your laptop screen and the guest standing beside you this can easily be done. There are some risks to this - trip hazards on the stage and the guest may be too drunk to be trusted not to do something stupid so consider the risk before handing over the mic

Beware one singer can lead to 10

2     Karaoke Night - a whole different ball game.

You will need to be on your ‘A’ game, fully kitted up with gear and music and organised with some method of collecting a list of singers and songs

In the good old days we had books of songs but these were very thick and were constantly going out of date, now we can simply get someone to ask for a song and you can search in seconds.

It can be chaos with loads of people asking for songs and all wanting to sing the same ones - beware lol

Or

It can be like pulling teeth with nobody interested, you can try a few things to get them on board e.g. asking the crowd to pop up and ask for a song to sing, going round the guests asking if they want to sing or start the singing yourself

Personally I’m not the biggest fan of karaoke, I see it as a necessary evil but I have DJs who love it - at a karaoke night I need to be as big of a fan as those who have come along to participate so be sure that Karaoke is for you

You will need a screen to show the words on - as big as possible, and ideally in a position that the singer can see it and still face the audience.   Even better is two screens, one for the singer and one for the audience.