Karaoke On The Internet

I had an absolute blast over the holidays playing with karaoke tracks. Karaoke tracks are instrumental versions of popular songs minus the lead vocals. In other words, just the music…you add the vocals!

Karaoke has been around for years. Almost every electronics outlet carries at least one karaoke machine and karaoke tapes and CDs can be found in record stores everywhere. Unfortunately, this can get expensive fast.

What I have in mind is a little different. I use my computer as a karaoke machine. And it’s much more powerful than even the high priced machines. You’ll need a few other things too. A good microphone is a great help. Radio Shack carries some condenser microphones starting around $20. For our purposes, this will work fine. But if you’re really serious about your singing, the higher the quality of the microphone, the better you’re going to sound.

Next you’ll need an input on your computer for the microphone to plug into. Just about every computer these days has a microphone input somewhere, usually next to where the speakers plug in. If the jack is different than the one on your microphone, Radio Shack can provide you with an adapter. Most sound cards use mini-plugs.

That’s all the hardware you’ll need, but you will need some software. Log onto: www.vanbasco.com. Here you’ll find a very nice “free” karaoke player. This player can play midi and kar files. Midi files are the most prevalent on the Net and most are free for downloading. Kar files can be found too, but there’s not nearly as many to choose from. Kar files have the advantage of being able to display the song lyrics as the song plays on your computer.

The quality of the midi files depends on who did the arranging and how good the musicians were that sequenced the midi tracks. While you’re at the vanBasco website, look to the left of the page and you’ll see a clickable menu. “MIDI search” is one of the choices. Click on it and you’ll be presented with a “song” search box. Type in the name of a song (or the artist) and you’ll find dozens of midi renditions of the song you asked for.

Here’s where quality and arrangement comes in. You’re going to find absolutely atrocious as well as wonderful arrangements of the same song. I usually just go down the list until I find one I like. While you’re searching for a particular song, you’ll be presented with hundreds of other songs as well. If it’s been written, there’s probably a midi version of it somewhere on the Net.

Here’s an example of how I get a track. In the search box mentioned above, type in Beatles. Click on the forth song that comes up…Something – the Beatles. This takes me to a website that has several midi selections on it. “Something” is one of them, click on it. If you’ve installed the vanBasco karaoke player, the song will start to play and several control boxes will appear. Look at the one named, “control.” Put your mouse on the slider labeled “key” and drag it up or down. This changes the key that the song was recorded in. So you won’t have to strain your voice to sing it. This is a nice sequence.

Once you have the midi file and learn to control the various instruments, it’s time to record the vocal track. That takes another program called N-track studio. Next week, we’re going to put it all together and get ready for the big-time! Reach me at: randy@randybenjamin.com.