Running a show

There are two major categories of people who might want to use software like kJams: professional show hosts (whether you're being paid or not, whether you're mobile or working in a fixed location)... and everyone else.

This page is for professional show hosts. :-)

I'm going to cover everything you will need to do, in roughly chronological order, to set up for and run a "professional" show; one that's out in public, with singers who are not necessarily your personal friends, and probably an employer who expects you to Just Do It. My target will be a serviceable mid-grade professional setup. It will be possible to do things less expensively, as well as more, but, by and large, you don't get what you don't pay for.

THIS WILL BE A WORK-IN-PROGRESS until I take this line out; you shouldn't have seen it anyway unless you prowl Recent Changes (Hi, Dave :-), since it's not linked from anywhere.

Prerequisites

We will assume that you've already installed and updated the program, and imported your main library and/or ripped your discs. We'll also assume for the moment that you're running kJams 2, and you're running it on a Mac, mostly because I am.

You also need a way to get audio out of your computer, as well as video -- and for a pro show, that needs to be a secondary video adapter. Most laptops have dual video adapters; some desktop machines do and some don't.

I said "get audio out". You won't need to get audio in, since for a professional show, you should not be sending your mic(s) through your computer; you really need an external mixer. You'll need one that can mix stereo sources, and possibly more than one stereo source; the more you need, the harder a good mixer is to come by.

One example of a serviceable mixer for karaoke is the Mackie DFX-12. I call it the "DFX-8", since it only has 8 input channel faders; the last 4 are all stereo, which amounts to 12 inputs. I picked this mixer for those 4 stereo inputs, which allows a KJ mic, mics for 2 singers, and a spare input, plus line-level inputs for the laptop, a separate source of background/fill music, if you do that, a commercial CD+G or CAVS player, and a spare input on the stereo/line side as well. They can be had pretty inexpensively on the secondary market.

As for the mics themselves, save up the money (if necessary) and just buy Shure SM-58's. :-) NO SWITCHES.

Setup

The actual setup of your system largely amounts to 'standard PA setup', and as such is outside our scope here, except to note that if you use an HDMI TV set as your external monitor, OS/X will switch your audio to it, when you probably don't want it to, and you'll need to manually switch it back before every show. We'll mention that again at the proper time.