Singing to the choir

On a whim, I plugged a karaoke CD into my DVD player. Not only did it play the music, but the words came up on the screen. I have since tried several DVD players that don't support this wonderful feature, but the folks that engineered this one felt it was important that I be able to do karaoke in my living room. Thank you, whoever you are!

Our music director at church was getting married and the choir was throwing him a shower. The music director is a truly unique individual. He is probably the best pianist that I know, he is an excellent warm and caring choir director, and he is modest to a fault. At the time, I had collected perhaps a dozen karaoke CDs. I offered to run a karaoke show for the shower.

I set about looking for disks on sale so that I knew there would be enough of a selection to make everyone happy. By the time of the gig, I had about 20 CDs. I threw together the equipment that I could scrounge and ran my first show.

It was quite a hit. It was like singing to the choir! Everyone wanted to sing, everyone was attentive to other's singing, and people were excited to sing together or solo. I heartily recommend a karaoke party for any choir!

I learned a few things from that gig:

1. The kind of speakers you get for you computer are not beefy enough for a karaoke gig. Also they are not particularly handy to cart around.

2. If someone can't hear their own voice, it is hard for them to stay in the right key. You need to have speakers pointed toward the singer. I later bought a set of Roland MA-8 speakers for this purpose. Actually, I now have two sets.

3. I didn't have nearly enough Beatles songs to keep Karen happy. I now have a dozen, and she seems pretty content.

4. Omni-directional mikes are not such a good idea for karaoke, unless you happen to like feedback.

Oh yeah... one more thing I learned...

5. I really wanted to do this again!