It’s been awhile sing my last karaoke post. I’ve been sharing SingSnap with friends and now I want to share with you!
Back when I first started writing on Pop Rock Nation, I wrote about SingSnap.com. SingSnap is an online karaoke site. I joined it when it first started in 2006, then took a several year hiatus. I got active on the site again in 2013, when someone who was reading my private music blog wanted to hear my singing voice. I remembered SingSnap and realized it wouldn’t take much to oblige his request. I quickly got hooked on online karaoke and have been hanging out there ever since.
Over the past few months, I’ve gotten involved in a private duet thread on SingSnap. This thread is where people who enjoy singing duets gather to find partners. It’s a good place to find people who share your taste in music and like to harmonize. Recently, we had a “challenge” which involved singing duets that met certain pre-determined requirements. The duet thread administrators paired couples up every few days and then that couple would work together to come up with a fresh duet. The first week, we had a “ladies choice” challenge. The women were responsible for choosing a song. I ended up being paired with an old Epinions friend named Andrew and together we sang this… I should mention that I have never met Andrew in person, but we both used to write for Epinions.com and have become “virtual” friends! I’m sure we’d be friends offline, too!
This is not an easy song to sing, especially if you’re a guy. Andrew did a good job!
Another challenge involved taking a song that was ordinarily not a duet and turning it into a duet. My partner for this challenge was a guy who loves to sing. I found one of his old recordings that he did fairly well and we turned it into this…
It never would have occurred to me to turn “Your Wildest Dreams” by The Moody Blues into a duet, but I think it worked pretty well. It was a bit of a challenge to pull this off, but we had fun with the process.
And sometimes, it’s just fun to learn new songs. This SingSnap user named Bullfrog and I have done a number of duets together and he learned “Somewhere In The Vicinity of the Heart” for our challenge.
This is a country song featuring Shenandoah and Alison Krauss. It’s not so often that I find guys who can sing this one. My partner had to learn it.
Other times, it’s just fun to find someone who can really sing and duet with them. Last week, I sang “You Don’t Have To Be A Star” with a SingSnap user from Texas named OBSEQUIOUS. It was a blast!
I think this guy belongs on a stage…
Yesterday, I was hanging on one of my favorite message boards and someone started a thread about karaoke. Naturally, I had to pipe up with my experiences with online karaoke and I think I might have gotten a few more folks to try it. I like to sing at live karaoke shows because it’s a lot of fun to have a real time crowd. But SingSnap is a great tool for people who like to sing, for learning music, working on technique, and meeting new people from around the world. It’s also a great place to learn some basics of sound engineering. I also confess that I get a lot of ideas for my music blogging from hanging out on SingSnap, especially on my private blog DungeonOfThePast, which is mostly about songs from the 70s and 80s. I only hope my neighbors don’t mind that I sing all the time. If I’ve inspired you to check out SingSnap, I hope you’ll give it a whirl. You can join for free and sing a limited number of songs. If you like it, you can get a paid membership for less than $100 a year.
