Karaoke At Home

It’s the last full work week of the year, thanks to the bizarre calendar that has both Christmas Day and New Years’ Day on a Friday, and Christmas Eve is apparently a federal holiday now. I know my people will get the day off. Gonna be a weird week as everyone crams their stuff into this week then turns into a pumpkin next week. I have no idea how I am going to get everything done I need to! It’s anxiety-inducing! What do I do here? Why did I have to get COVID and lose like four days of work? I’m so tired! 𝓹𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓼𝓮 𝓱𝓮𝓵𝓹 𝓶𝓮

Home Karaoke

I couldn’t think of anything good to write today, so I thought I’d write about how, because my wife and I enjoy karaoke, I built a weird little karaoke hole in our game room at home. I got one that was a little bit more expensive, but you can get karaoke machines off of Amazon for like $80, and the rest is simple if you have an Apple TV (Airplay - so if you have a TV or device that can be Airplayed to, this also works) or Chromecast. I’ll give you the iOS/Airplay version because that’s what I use.

On your iPhone or iPad, load the Youtube app, then choose screen mirroring. It will mirror your entire iOS device’s Youtube app, but when you select a song it will only play the video, meaning that it’ll be just like you’re in a karaoke bar, except you’re not waiting for your turn as much or spending $45 on one plate of chicken fingers and $10 for a beer. The only bad thing is it doesn’t support queuing up songs, but it’s fine, who cares. People can choose each time.

Me singing the song “Tyler” by “The Toadies,” a song that is “creepy.”

Another way to do this is to use the Karafun app which is $5.99 for a two day pass, or $9.99 for a month - it has a 39,000 song database, you can download songs for offline use, it allows you to manage singers and queue up songs, change the key and the tempo of songs - on top of that, it also has a web-based queue functionality, so people can scan a QR code and choose their songs versus handing around the iPad. This is what I use when I have (well, had) people over. It’s super slick. I love it.

You can even put photos up during songs!

This is the Karafun app doing Wake Me Up When September Ends by the guy from Green Day’s band Green Day.

The black line at the bottom there is because Karafun has a web link it generates once, and only once, meaning that the one time I shared it online people kept putting up joke songs into the queue. Not good.

But it doesn’t have all the songs I want, and I’m a prick, and thus I went on Fiverr, where tons of people will gladly make you a karaoke version of any song for about $15. I use this guy from Macedonia who is really great at what he does, is extremely kind and patient with me and my exceedingly specific requests. I just had him create a karaoke version of The Toadies’ You’ll Come Down, an extremely specific choice because I’m me, and I know what I want to sing.

And it looks great!

It’s also important to remember that there’s always an audience for karaoke, so you need to make sure you don’t pick extremely long songs, especially if you’re singing a song that only you know. But that’s the fun of karaoke - walking that tightrope between enjoyable and obnoxious, getting steadily drunker until you finally pick a song you have to quit 1 minute in because you’re not able to follow the text.

Obviously this isn’t something I’ve done, but it sounds plausible.