Karaoke party ideas from Evite.com!

Lights, camera, karaoke! Why go to a crowded, smoky karaoke bar when you can put on the hits at home with your own karaoke singing party? Here are fancy tips for karaoke party planners:

Decoration
The most important karaoke party-planning ideas are all about the decorations. Karaoke party rental stores can provide you with the essential karaoke party supplies like a karaoke machine, a microphone and lots of karaoke CDs with your favorite songs (We will not be needing these of course! With MAGIC SING KARAOKE MICROPHONE, they’re all in one! No need for bulky machines and mics with wires you might slip over, nor karaoke cds, thanks to Magic Sing’s compact versatile design and built-in songs plus song chip slots!) but you’ll also want to create a stage and great lighting.

If you’re crafty, build a sturdy stage out of wood and paint it silver. If that’s too much effort or expense, use a silver throw rug to section off a part of your living room as the stage area. Position the stage in front of a door to a bedroom or a large closet, and let that serve as the dressing room. Hanging up a silver shower curtain in front of the door makes a sparkly curtain and lets your singers take the stage with style. (I looove this idea!)

Hang party lights around the stage for extra razzle-dazzle, and use a bright lamp as the singer’s spotlight. You can create a nightclub atmosphere in the room by hanging a disco ball from the ceiling and positioning card tables and folding chairs around the stage so your guests can sit and enjoy the show.

Etiquette
As the host, it’s your job to bring out your guests’ inner divas while respecting their wishes if they’d rather just watch. You’ll calm nerves by asking shy folks to sing back-up, so they can get used to being onstage.

If you’re faced with a lot of tentative performers, turn them all into karaoke kings and queens by starting things off as a group sing-along party, where you play classics like “YMCA” and “Greased Lightning” and get everybody singing, dancing and playing tambourine together. Boas, hats, funky glasses and wigs help your guests get into character, and they’ll appreciate a list of easy-to-sing hits (think Madonna, not Mariah).

Finally, during guitar solos and flubbed lyrics, every singer can use a hand, so give them one by clapping and cheering to fill that awkward space.

Activities
Take a tip from karaoke bars by creating songbooks featuring all the available songs that guests can look through to find what they’d like to sing (MAGIC SING has this too as an accessory! Weeeee!).

Put out notecards where guests can write down their names and their song choice, and play the selections in the order you receive them so no one has to wait too long to sing. If some guests start to hog the machine, switch to going around in a circle and letting every person have a turn.

Give out prizes for best song, best impersonation, biggest crowd pleaser, wackiest song choice and most enthusiastic (I love I love!).

Food
Since karaoke is the main attraction, you can keep your food simple. Room-temperature buffet foods like hummus and pita, chips and dip, cheese and crackers, and crudités let your guests graze between numbers and keeps the focus on the performers.

Put out bowls of salted nuts, olives and fresh berries on each table for guests to enjoy while watching the show. Finish with bite-size desserts like brownies and assorted cookies.

Drinks
Same Old Song (serves 4)
• 4 oz. sweet vermouth
• 2 oz. dry vermouth
• 4 oz. gin
• 4 oz. orange juice
• 4 teaspoons lemon juice
• 4 dashes orange bitters
• 4 orange wedges

Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with ice cubes, and pour in vermouth, gin, juices and orange bitters. Shake well and strain into 4 cocktail glasses. Garnish each with an orange wedge.

Non-Alcoholic – Make your own soda station with assorted flavored syrups, club soda and fruit garnishes.

Are you stuffed now with ideas for your karaoke party that you get so excited you want to begin planning the nearest time possible for your very own karaoke night with family and friends? If you are, then we’re in the same league! Reading the ideas from Evite made me so excited! C’mon let’s karaoke party!

I’m having a St. Patrick’s Day hangover, because for one, I can’t get John Mayer’s song St. Patrick’s Day off my head. It has been playing there since a few days ago. Another, this week is green week. I’m just inclined to wear green these past days (no one can pinch me!) since green too is my favorite color of all. A verdant lover I am. And because of this hangover, Magic Sing’s karaoke mic is so sooo much always there to make me happy. Singing John Mayer using Magic Sing is my thing for now.
Lemme share to you the lyrics of the song…

St. Patrick’s Day
John Mayer

Here comes the cold
Break out the winter clothes
And find a love to call your own
You – enter you
Your cheeks a shade of pink
And the rest of you in powder blue

Who knows what will be
But I’ll make you this guarantee

No way November will see our goodbye
When it comes to December it’s obvious why
No one wants to be alone at Christmas time

In the dark, on the phone
You tell me the names of your brothers
And your favorite colors
I’m learning you
And when it snows again
We’ll take a walk outside
And search the sky
Like children do

No way November will see our goodbye
When it comes to December it’s obvious why
No one wants to be alone at Christmas time
And come January we’re frozen inside
Making new resolutions a hundred times
February, won’t you be my valentine?

And we’ll both be safe ’til St. Patrrick’s Day

We should take a ride tonight around the town
and look around at all the beautiful houses
something in the way that blue lights on a black night
can make you feel more
everybody, it seems to me, just wants to be
just like you and me

No one wants to be alone at Christmas time
Come January we’re frozen inside
Making new resolutions a hundred times
February, won’t you be my valentine?

And if our always is all that we gave
And we someday take that away
I’ll be alright if it was just ’til St. Patrick’s Day.

Yes, I am back!

Mellow dramatic and nostalgic, but who won’t be.  Where I am, it has been raining for the last four hours, it is so cold, my kids are asleep and with me is my husband tapping on the keyboard of his computer for a report that he has to submit early tomorrow morning, and me, well just drowning myself in the piles of reports I have to either approve or disapprove.

I just remembered that I have yet to practice a song for a friend’s wedding.   She had insisted I sing for her and her one true love after coercing me into having myself fitted to be one of her bride’s maids as well, and in my search for the perfect song to sing, I realized that there is a better way for me to be able to do this.  (Oh how I wish I had the Enter Tech Magic Sing EG-18000 so I can just key in the songs and then…) but for now, surfing through the internet would have to do.  (Until I get my hands on one of these sleek, Magic Sing Mics and then we will be talking business.)

So yes, frustrated as I have to go through ever single song that either has the word “love” or “forever” in it, suddenly, the perfect song, “The First Time I Loved Forever” which became a hit in the days of the TV series, Beauty and the Beast starring Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman.   Ah!  Love!  Teary-eyed, I know I have found the perfect song for my friend, not that she is the beauty and… oh well, go figure!  Oh the magic of love, the magic of singing (and yes, the Magic Sing and the magic it brings!).  Songs magically transform a so-so world into one that is full of life and love.

The irony of it is, no matter how we feel we have entered into the age of technology, we live today with the fads of the past, the apparel of the past and the music of the past and it still is perfectly fit with the lifestyle we all live today!

With all the high tech gadgetry and gizmos we have today, we still reminisce our past and we may not necessarily live in it, we continue to trudge on our lives with it!

The beauty of our life today with all of our access to technology is the fact that we can immortalize our past and celebrate their glory, and singing songs of the yesteryears and upgrading it to the beats we know so well is a testimony to how we actually appreciate our past as a people and yes babbling on, we may hear remakes upon remakes upon remakes of these beautiful songs, one thing is for sure, over the Magic Mic, it will still be of the same tune, the same beat and the same sound that will truly enable us to travel back in time to have a feel of how things sounded back then.

And yes, I guess, to put it in a nutshell, the first time we all learn to love forever is when we start loving everything that has happened, is happening and what will happen.

In this generation of multimedia communication, high-definition gadgets, broadbands and wifis, computer-operated machineries and ultra-modern gizmos, one thing comes to mind—high-technology. High-tech, meaning the technology that is at the cutting edge or the most advanced technology (thanks Wikipedia), is the ultimate description of the progressive advancement of everything we use and operate. Of course, karaoke microphones are of no exception. Since the birth of karaoke in Japan, it has evolved into this equipment that is indeed high-tech. And Magic Sing is the fairest of them all. How? Let me tell you.

1.  Karaoke microphones nowadays are wireless. No more primitive wired mics in which your mobility is hindered and in which you worry about tripping over the lines. You can even use it in an open site with its 35 feet wireless distance.
2. They come with a remote control. No worries with convenience. Just use the remote control as you sit cozily in your sofa.
3. They have improved picture quality and clearer vocal sounds. All-In-One digital karaoke indeed.
4.  Songs are built-in, and there are thousands of them. You do not need to use CD or DVD players.
5. Besides having built-in songs, you can even upgrade with song chip expansion slots. The current model even has four slots.
5. They have a built-in USB interface and battery charge status indicator.
6. They contain different melody instruments for background music, and even have the ability to change your voice/pitch to male or female.
7. They mean entertainment to the highest level with team game and competition functions.
8. They include a singing tutor function. Green color if you are too fast or too slow. Blue color if your pitch is too low. Red if your pitch is too high. Black if you are in perfect sync.
9. Full karaoke functions including adjustable key/tempo/echo are included in these fancy karaoke microphones, plus 20 song reservation while in play.
10.  There is a built-in memory for 8 minutes recordings & playback, built-in external video background input (VCD, DVD, Video Camera) and audio output mode (Amplifier or TV).

In case you didn’t know, they are the built-in features of Magic Sing models, including the latest Enter Tech Magic Sing ET-18000. Undeniably high-tech!

Although no official survey had been conducted yet, videoke afficionados would agree there are just some songs worth singing all the time, whatever the occasion.

There is no scientific proof in this but a few searches over the internet would tell you Filipinos like to hum it up with classics like Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”;  the very popular party-starter Build me up Buttercup, Hotel California by the Eagles, Crazy for you by Madonna, Jose Mari Chan’s Beautiful Girl, and even Sharon Cuneta’s Bituing Walang Ningning.

Can you share what’s on your list?

And the good thing about this is all of these songs can be found in the Magic Mic Karaoke! Why bother buy videoke compact disks that usually contain songs of just one artist? In the plug and play magic mic karaoke, with various song chips to choose from, you can have a wide array of song choices; from pop to ballad to rock and even to novelty (think April Boy Regino and Sexbomb)! The list is alphabetical in order so it’s totally hassle-free to look for a song.

Over two dozens of song chips to choose from, with each chip alone containing hundreds of popular and unforgettable songs, you’ll surely get the party going right in your home or office.