A complaint about Karaoke Conditions

I went to a friend’s birthday the other night at a Karaoke restaurant in Los Angeles called Boardwalk 11. The night was fun and the place was filled with both singers and non-singers which I love, because I really enjoy watching all types of levels of singing. While the food was pretty good and the song selection and DJ were great, I will say that I could not believe the terrible singing conditions that they had.

One of the WORST things you can do to your voice is speak loudly over people in loud club conditions. This restaurant was so loud. As a result, while you were waiting to sing your song, you were killing you voice just to be heard by the people around you in conversation. Sadly, what they had turned up so loud was the accompaniment to the songs and not the singer’s voices.

Speaking of volume, when on the stage they had the microphones turned way down and no moniters. This environment is really harsh on a singer, because if the singer can’t hear themselves, they don’t relax and they tend to push there voices, which lowers their confidence, and pulls from their performance quality. As a result they loose the interest of the audience who then proceeds to talk louder to their friends over the loud music making the singer insecure.

You get my point. I think a great Karaoke place should have great singing conditions. A good microphone, a moniter, and appropriate music volume. (Song selection of course is key as well.)

Just watch yourselves in these situations and try and protect your voice when you find yourself in them. Don’t be surprised if you get up to sing after yelling to your friends across the table for an hour and find that it hurts to sing, and your performance directly suffers.

If you must be a part of an evening of loud music and loud talking try and give yourself vocal rest the next day or more to recover. Too much strain in bad conditions is how people can get bad things like nodules- which are blisters on the vocal chords.

Also, don’t forget to warm-up your voice befoer you go out for Karaoke, it will make a huge difference on how you sing and speak in the club. Voice Lessons To Go Voice Lesson Cds volumes 1-4 are great to do in the car before you get inside! You can purchase them at http://voicelessonstogo.com/

Tags: karaoke, preparing your voice for a night of karaoke, singing karaoke in loud clubs

• Vocal Timbre
• What’s your Vocal Warm-Up routine?
• Taking care of your singing voice

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under karaoke. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.