So I did my first show..

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MacOCD
Posts: 36
Joined: Wed Feb 24, 2016 1:18 am

So I did my first show..

Post by MacOCD »

I did my first Karaoke evening in our local club on Saturday night.

I'm doing the shows for free as a little bit of community spirit. Our village has no bars/pubs and just 1 village club that can not even afford to open every day, or to pay for any bar staff (we're all volunteers).

My hope is to revive the popularity of the club, to get more people in regularly and get the community meeting up socially again. I'd call my first attempt a success, I didn't over-promote it as I wanted to work out how to run everything but we had around 40 people. One weird thing... No bad singers at all??? I might have to fill that role myself.

Equipment
I had help setting up from someone who does small live shows and had some equipment that was useful. I borrowed an ancient 8 Channel Powered Mixer and used 4 cheap Dynamic Mics (3 Singers + Host). I also borrowed 2 powered floor monitor speakers, 1 for the singers to hear themselves in the mix and 1 so I could hear it where I was located. We added a few small LED disco lights that automatically changed with the beat which seemed to add to the experience. I connected to the club's Passive 12" (Speakon connector) speakers which really gave a great sound.

I used my iMac to run the kJams2 into the Mixer via the headphone Jack and added with an extra 20" old monitor I had lying around as the lyrics screen. I also broadcast the lyrics to the club's TV for the audience to see via my AppleTV.

I used a script to disable iTunes which meant I could use my iMac's remote control to play pause tracks whilst not seated at the Mac. I had pause after each track set in preferences and this worked really well, I was able to control the show whilst engaging with the audience.


Song Book
I bought over 6,000 songs, mostly on CDs on eBay, I managed to buy 1 guy's collection of "200+ Karaoke CDs" for just over $20 thanks to a badly worded Auction listing & collection only requirement. That alone got me 2,500ish tracks. There was masses of Sunfly, Zoom & other good stuff in there. I bought many collections on eBay so inevitably had lots of duplicate tracks. One I filtered out the duplicated, the awful ones and a couple of not original discs, I was left with around 4,500 tracks and I added another 200 or so tracks I wanted, or felt should be there, via online purchases from Sunfly, Zoom & Tricera. I took all my disks & receipts with me. It took me from January to May to rename, spot duplicates with different names, correct Artists etc. They day before the show I spotted I had "Dream" & "All I have to Do Is Dream" by the Everly Brothers, but "Beatles", "The Beatles" & "Beatles, The" type differences were a little easier to spot. I'm confident I've removed all duplicates where names are slightly different, "and" or "&", "Rockin/Rockin'/Rocking". "Loving/Lovin" etc.

I wrote an excel VBA script & word template to make efficient printed song lists. I managed to get the whole lot, perfectly readable, on to 32 sides of A4. I did "By Artist", "By Song Title" and a separate "Duets" list to make it easier for couples to find an appropriate song. I printed song selection slips and also left my iPad (locked to wtkJams KE in Kiosk mode) for people to enter their own songs. I only entered 2 songs myself the whole night, 1 from a slip & 1 of those where I noticed someone had selected "Favourite" instead of "Tonight" in wtkJams KE. Loads of people downloaded wtkJams Lite and were entering their own song & helping others. This made my job so much easier.

Someone very kindly said they thought I had the best sing selected they'd ever seen at a karaoke by some distance, and they'd been to plenty.

ON THE NIGHT

It all went well, but I did have some teething problems and skills to master, stuff that didn't crop up in a trial equipment run at home.

Screamers
There were 2 or 3 singers who were SO LOUD! Even when I turned their mics way down. The clipped/distorted vocals were quite unpleasant in the room. Apparently I need a compressor to reign this in. I'm considering buying a Behringer Xenyx inexpensive mixer with single knob compression built-in. Alternatively Compressors only seem to be around $30 to $40 on eBay. I need to buy a mixer anyway, and I would have other use for it myself too as my kids write & record their own music.

Indecisive Singer
I had a singer who decided last second (whilst at the Mic) they didn't want to sing the song they'd chosen, but they hadn't chosen another. What I should have done is manually moved them down the KJ Rotation list a couple of spots to give them time to pick another song. I actually marked the song as sung which messed up their place in the queue, but I've worked that out now.

Managing Audience Expectations
With an hour to go noticed I had around 60 minutes of queued songs already in the queue so I announced that the queue was now full, "If you haven't made your choice you can still save it as a favourite & sing it next time". I subsequently spotted that 2 singers had 7 songs in the queue, it would have been better to have let more people keep picking songs. This was because I wasn't in front of the Mac when I made the announcement. I did have a quiet word with the 2 singers, who weren't being greedy, it's just no-one else had been adding songs.

On the whole it was a fabulous evening and we have another booked in for next month that we will be promoting in the village, now I have a little experience with the equipment.

Subsequent Thoughts

Personalising The Show
I'd really like to have been able to personalise the experience to the club. I need to to work out how to customise the ShowScreens & add new ones and I need to use the Messenger Message feature in future.

Show Report
I'd really like to be able to look back at each event and see who sang what and in which order, some "On the Night" stats. Is there any data I can access to generate this info?

Song Length
I made the mistake to deleting all but my preferred version of each track from kJams, as it turned out there are some songs I should have also kept shorter versions of. It's going to take some effort to go back through my discs to locate the shorter American Pie for example.

Show Flow
When setting up previously I didn't find the auto-fade to iTunes Python script worked very well for me. I have now also disabled iTunes to allow control of kJams via my Mac remote control, so I need to work out a solution to keep background music running between singers. It would suit me much better if kJams2 could do this, but I could just plug an iPod/Phone into another mixer input I guess. I also need to get better at notifying singers they're up next or next but one to keep a better flow.

Show Length
What is a typical show length people expect? We did 3 hours for our trial night but it went in no time at all. We're going of 5 hours next time and going the kids priority for the first couple of hours. I'll need to work out a strategy of managing the queue quite accurately for that.

I had a great time and I can't imagine any other solution than kJams that would have had the evening run so smoothly, even with a novice at the controls.

DeusExMachina
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Joined: Sun Apr 20, 2008 9:57 am
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
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Re: So I did my first show..

Post by DeusExMachina »

For singers who consistently sing too loudly, adding a compressor won't help all that much, since the clipping takes place prior to the input, so the compression won't have much to work with. It will still sound like crap.
Tips for getting perfect meta data also include searching for terms like "shes", "hes", "cant", "dont", etc., and replacing them with the correct apostrophed version.
Also many tracks will differ with things such as "ft.", "feat", "&", "and" etc., all signifying an additional artist/duet.
Then you have duets where they reverse the featured artist.
Perfect metadata can be a chore!

Misworded/misspelled auctions rule!
Last edited by DeusExMachina on Tue Jun 28, 2016 9:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

dave
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Re: So I did my first show..

Post by dave »

:o

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