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What are your Karaoke experience(s)?

yukio_michael

後輩
8 Mar 2005
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Everyone knows karaoke is huge in Japan, pop singles come out regularly in the format:

1. Single
2. b-side
3. Instrumental (karaoke) version

There is the get on stage with the reflective backdrop karaoke, the anoy your friends in the booth ending with osomatsu sama afterwords... the sing karaoke to win liquor at the hostess bar karaoke, etcetera.

The only time I've ever thought of effacing myself by letting the world hear my wretched singing voice is while I was in Japan... but I'm wondering if my experiences are similar to others.... outside of karaoke with friends, this is what I've found...

There always seems to be one guy who is a professional trained singer (you find this in karaoke I think eveywhere...), they belt out some showa-period tune perfectly while girls bat their lashes and look on in amazement.... then they do it every other night and it gets boring to you... but not to anyone else.

People I've seen in Japan take karaoke seriously, very seriously, maybe too seriously? Forget giving a half-hearted rendition of whatever song you choose to sing, people tend to give you a disdainful look if you're not giving it 100%... Getting drunk and brutalizing your favourites doesn't need to be so stressful, but it seems like public karaoke is like this---

I won a bottle of korean chu-hi at a hostess bar when I was in Japan, it was for my stirring rendition of "Raindrops keep fallin' on my head."... I sang it as shmaltsy as I could, and, it is a song I know pretty well... call me a Burt Bacharach fan I guess.

I guess singing karaoke publicly, you realize how little you actually DO know of a song, as verses flick by on the screen, you're very drunk, and you get the feeling that picking "Welcome to the Jungle" might not have been the best choice... I'm not very good at reading kanji, and all the pop songs I know are by girls...

Has anyone practiced karaoke with the intent to impress others? What are your karaoke resources?

Tell me your karaoke-monogatari.

ps. Oh yes, one other thing as I look for an admin to pm about deleting my dumb double post, in karaoke, and a lot of music in general, there is a difference in the way that sylables are sung...

Letters like u and i which may be more silent in spoken Japanese get a full beat as fits the music... also, r-sylables get pronounced as if they were an "l", instead of the cross between a d & r, in spoken Japanese.

Mycernius said:
No worries, doubling has been deleted
Thanks, appreciate it!
 
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Karaoke isn't an exclusively Japanese thing for me. I'd done it in America before I ever did in Japan, and I continue to do it when it suits me. The vast majority of times I went to karaoke (at my peak, I was going maybe twice a week over the course of a couple of months), large quantities of alcohol and friends were involved. We went so frequently that we were usually given repeat customer stamp cards, and one of my most regular karaoke friends knew exactly which books had the songs she wanted to sing (if you've been to a number of karaoke places, you know they have different books with different songs, sometimes as many as 6 or 7). When waiting for a nomikai to start, and not wanting to go all the way home and come back out, karaoke offered a low cost, relaxing way to spend an hour or two. I sing everything from hip hop to rock to country and even some j-pop. Our group of friends varied wildly in Japanese ability, so I was able to learn about some groups I might never have been able to through karaoke. Our Japanese friends introduced me to Hirai Ken, Mongol 800, Chemistry, SMAP, and others through our singing sessions. I'd also drop an occasional anime song in there, but found I rarely knew all the words.

Karaoke doubled as a studying tool. Trying a Japanese song I only sort of know helped with my kanji recognition and ability to enunciate the language. Karaoke boxes were always the preferred method, but I've stepped on stages in front of large groups of people and enjoyed myself immensely. I find myself doing more rock songs than anything else, mainly because the singing tends to be slower and the voices less...refined...than something like R&B or soul.
 
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I LOVEEEEEEEEEEEEEE KARAOKE!!!! I have done Karoake 3 times when I was in Japan, with my wife, and some friends of us. We had this small room, and we ordered food, and drinks, had 3 books where we could pick songs from * around 500 english songs*. SOOO MUCH FUN FUN FUN!!! I song Bon Jovi maybe 30 times or something.... My wife hates me because of this haha, because I always stole the microphone... MUHAHAHAHHAHAHA I DONT CARE I WANT TO SING!!!!!! :devilish:
 
yukio_michael said:
Tell me your karaoke-monogatari.
My karaoke-monogatari is here. I posted this a while back.

Today I still enjoy singing karaoke in Japanese, especially Japanese enka.
 
Pachipro, are you still in the states now? Are you planning on visiting or going back to Japan sometime? You seem to have a lot of great threads full of your time in Japan, you seem to have made the most of it, which is very cool.

Hmmm SMAP is a good choice for karaoke, I hate SMAP, but, those guys are everywhere... There are so few pop songs by male singers. Belting out a good enka song, that'd be the way to go though...
 
yukio_michael said:
Pachipro, are you still in the states now? Are you planning on visiting or going back to Japan sometime? You seem to have a lot of great threads full of your time in Japan, you seem to have made the most of it, which is very cool.
Thank you yukio_michael.Yes I am still in the states now ym. We moved back here in late '88 when things got out of hand in Japan to allow me to purchase a house. Land speculation went through the roof.

We visit at least once a year and will be visiting again on the 16th of April for about 11 days.

I guess you can say I made the most out of my experiences as I lived there for almost 17 years from when I was 18 and have basically seen, and done it all when it comes to Japan.

Hmmm SMAP is a good choice for karaoke, I hate SMAP, but, those guys are everywhere... There are so few pop songs by male singers. Belting out a good enka song, that'd be the way to go though...
SMAP is pretty popular for karaoke, but I have found that enka is easier to sing especially for someone who is tone deaf like me. However it is fun.
 
I don't know if too many people take part in what I'm about to say but I love love-hotel karaoke. Most love hotels are equipped with microphones and either a tv channel or a radio-like channel of instrumentals on the bed's headboard for you to rock out on. I found a love-hotel in Dogenzaka last year that had the best beats/instrumentals, they were like when JPOP was good, all poppy in the 90s, like that and after I was on the bed you couldn't get me off the microphone :) Seriously, so for the singers out there, check out lovehotels with 80s/90s machines thrown in them. I remember in 2004 I was in a lovehotel that had just microphones, that's it, they worked off the room's radio and I had one of my girl's sing the Sailor Moon cartoon theme song in Japanese while I sung it in english, I had never heard it in Japanese until then, ahhhh Sailor Moon.

Josh
 
Karaoke was so fun 👍
Though you are right about them taking it seriously. I actually had to try hard and sing it correctly. That took research and I felt very dorky for researching songs, but not as much as I would if it were english songs. The fact that I could put it all under the learning japanese experience made it seem less anal in my eyes.
I love their little rooms and I haven't found a karaoke place in America that is not in a bar. Just having a room with nice stereo for hanging out with friends would be awesome to have in my state ^0^
P.S. All those anime shows were life savers when I began karaoke😊
 
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