How to host a Karaoke show?
Experience will be your best teacher when running your Karaoke show! Let me take you through a typical show and offer a few tips and suggestions that might make things a little easier for you. To start with setting up your equipment during the day when the establishment is relatively empty is always a good idea. Believe me, it is no fun carrying in and setting up in a crowded room. Besides, it's nice to be able to walk in at about twenty minutes before the show, pass out your song books, throw a switch or two, and be ready to go.
Now you're at the show and have passed out the song books and turned on the system. You stand up, introduce yourself, and explain to everyone where they can find the request forms and pens. Now you put in a disc and sing the first song of the night and hope that some request forms start coming in. No such luck. You've finished your song and no one has brought up a request yet. If this is your first show, you are pretty nervous and you feel like everyone's focusing on you. Well, to some extent, they are! The best advice I can give you at this moment is to just head into the crowd and start talking to people, through the mic, table by table, asking who's going to be brave enough to sing first. You will soon find out that most people love to have attention drawn to them, even if they pretend they don't!
Finally when you start to get some requests coming in. You put in the disc and call up the first singer. When they start singing, you adjust the mic to music volume level to where you think it sounds the best. Sometimes you will need to increase or decrease the mic reverb level to make the singer sound better. In time, you will learn what adjustments are needed as soon as someone starts singing. It is very important to make every singer sound as good as they can. If you have at least three or four singers, just keep the rotation going and not do any singing yourself. It is perfectly alright for the KJ to sing if he or she puts their name in the rotation and follows the rules like everyone else. Don't forget this is KARAOKE and even if you are a great singer - don't sing song after song (unless your customers prefer to be entertained). Your job is to get people up to sing and enjoy themselves!
Now it's about at the half way mark of the show and you have quite a few singers. This is the point at which, if the place has a dance floor, you could play a few of the more popular dance songs off some regular cd's. If you don't do this automatically, someone will almost always make this request. Try to keep this dance period down to no more than thirty minutes because you may have a lot of people still waiting to sing.
If there is one thing you can count on, it is that some time during every show, you will have someone complaining that they haven't gotten to sing enough. All you can do is to explain your rules of rotation to them.
Let's say that there is about half an hour remaining before the show is supposed to end and you still have a stack of request forms. Now is a good time to collect your song books and decide if you are going to stay over an extra half hour or so to let everyone remaining sing one last song. The crowd will appreciate it and so will the owners of the establishment. Of course if the person running the place offers to pay you to stay over for a certain amount of time, go for it!
Like I said earlier, this is how a typical show should go. Some nights will be easier than others. As long as you stick to your rules of rotation, keep a sense of humor, and treat everyone with respect, it won't be long before you have a following of singers that will be at all your shows.
