Vermont Diary Part 1

Lured to visit my friend’s Peter & April on the pretense of going to a concert by a lap-style guitar performer (which, after some consideration, we decided to skip) I find myself in Vermont Friday night doing Karaoke Revolution.
I hate Karaoke.

But Peter wants to play, so here we are.

Karaoke Revolution has this interesting thing that ‘rates’ your singing; it shows the words, along with a bar that goes up and down to match the changing notes the singer is supposed to sing. A little arrow represents your singing, and it can be above, below, or on the line. It seems to be based purely on whether you are making a noise that matches the expected tone at the expected time. So if you can grunt in key, you can do quite well even if you don’t know the words.

I don’t do too badly with Sweet Home Alabama, but I crash and burn on It’s The End of The World As We Know It. Of course, that song is damn hard to sing (just try it!) But then I don’t do much better on the next song I choose (the title of which, now eludes me.)

As you perform, the software rates your performance as Good, Poor or Lousy. A succession of lousy’s and the crowd starts to boo and walk away. Do really badly and your avatar collapses in dejection and a ‘Song Failure’ message appears. Talk about rejection.

I don’t know that this will help much with stage fright.

April creams both of us, getting through all three of her songs successfully and consistently scoring well. Peter and I do okay on one song each but don’t manage to complete the next too. I was doing pretty badly on the second one when Peter observed “Maybe we should switch to the easy mode,” at which point we all burst into laughter and I was hosed.

I partly blame the poor song choices; I'm just not doing Like A Virgin, sorry.