Desperate for a simple solution, I asked around on Facebook and a friend told me that she had once hosted a karaoke event using a program she had found online. She told me that she had simply hooked her laptop up to a set of speakers and paid a small subscription fee, which gave her access to lots of songs to sing along with. I looked into several online options like this and eventually selected a program called KaraFun to use for our event. There is a lot to like about KaraFun and I highly recommend the program to anyone else who is planning their own karaoke event. The software that KaraFun provides was free to download and very easy to use. KaraFun also boasts a very large music library of over 17,000 songs, which meant that just about anything that we could think of would be available to sing - including lots of Christmas music. There was a small subscription fee that had to be paid to allow us to access KaraFun's music library. I paid $5.99 for a two-day pass, giving me access to the music library for more than enough time for the event. There is also an option to pay for an ongoing monthly subscription, which would certainly be worthwhile for serious karaoke enthusiasts but was more than we needed for a one-time event. KaraFun also has an app which can be downloaded onto Apple or Android devices. In the end I ended up putting the app onto the library's iPad, which gave the teens the freedom to hold the iPad right in front of them to see the lyrics they needed to sing and eliminated the need to set up a more cumbersome table with the laptop.
The KaraFun program worked perfectly for our event. The teens were pleased with the song selection, and they sang a good mix of contemporary tunes and Christmas classics. The free software was actually very easy to use and provides users with a surprisingly large range of editing options that allows you to customize the music to your liking. The feature that I actually enjoyed the most was the ability to adjust the volume in three different areas. Of course the music's volume could be adjusted. The impressive part was being able to adjust the volume of the back-up vocals (or turn them off entirely) or turn on and adjust the volume of a lead vocalist. We ended up turning on the lead vocals but adjusting the volume to make this element fairly quiet. This gave less-confident singers a little bit of extra guidance as they could follow the lead voice, but keeping the lead vocals quiet made the singer's voice the focal point of the performance.
In the end the equipment that I needed was fairly minimal. I put the KaraFun app onto the iPad and hooked the iPad up to a large set of speakers. We also had a wireless microphone hooked up to a different set of speakers, which was perhaps not an ideal sound scenario but was the best system that we could come up with given the equipment at our disposal. At any rate, none of the teens noticed that the sound was coming from two different places so no harm done. I had a small book cart available to be used as a stand for the iPad and where the microphone could be set between singers. Finally, I also set up a laptop to the side of the main stage. This allowed teen who were waiting for their turn to sing to easily browse the music library and make sure that their songs were available before stepping up to stage to sing.
Of course, there was more to this event than deciding which karaoke program we were going to use!
As the title of this program indicates, there were also cookies and cocoa to be had. I heated up lots of water in our coffee pot and put out a tub of cocoa mix. It was really as easy as that. For the cookies, I actually asked my very enthusiastic Teen Advisory Group if they would be willing to help provide the cookies for this program. I asked everyone to bring 1-2 dozen cookies to the program. The three teens from my TAG group who were able to attend complied and there were more than enough cookies to go around. Asking the teens to bring food is allowed by my library's policies but might not be acceptable at other libraries - be sure to check your policies before trying this. But the fact that we were able to do this not only meant that I could save some money on snacks, but also that we got to eat some yummy homemade goodies instead of bland store-bought cookies.
The teens also spent quite a bit of time creating Christmas decorations for the party. We hung up tons of snowflakes and made festive paper chains. And of course, there was the awesome book tree. Unfortunately, I neglected to take any pictures of the other decor. Oops.
In the end I had five teens in attendance for this program. There was much interest in the program and almost all of the handouts that I had put out were taken. But this time of year is tricky for a lot of people as schedules fill up quickly and everyone is busy getting ready for the holidays. I was not too surprised at this fairly low turnout, and I actually wonder if we would have had more success holding this program a week later after Christmas had ended but during the kids' break from school. The low attendance, however, did have its perks. We could all be very relaxed about the structure of the program. I never had to put together a formal waiting list of singers and what songs they wanted to sing, which I may have needed to do with a large crowd. Instead we could simply use good sense to take turns singing and we could afford to take our time between singers to find the songs we wanted. A larger audience would certainly have been nice, but there was something to be said for the relaxed nature of a smaller program too.
Fortunately, this was also a very inexpensive program to put together, and an inexpensive program does make one feel better about low attendance. I only spent about $13 on this program, half of that cost being the rental of the KaraFun music library and the other half being the cost of the cocoa mix. All other supplies and equipment used were already on hand. Even if I had needed to purchase cookies to serve for this party, the overall cost would still have been very, very low.
I would certainly plan some version of this karaoke event again for the teens again in a heartbeat. Now that I know about the features that KaraFun offers and know how to set up the equipment it would actually be a very easy program to plan. Perhaps we'll see a karaoke event during this year's Summer Library Program...
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