Hello. So after living here for awhile, I finally tried karaoke and I was a bit confused. When I have tried Karaoke (KTV) in China, the artist’s voice is playing over the speaker and you can sing along to it. When I went to Big Echo, there was only the instrumental and no vocals. I know that you are supposed to sing yourself, but I like having the artist’s voice to help dictate the singing tempo.
Does anyone know if this is the norm in Japan? Or if there are karaoke chains or places (Tokyo) that also plays the vocals? I have tried googling it, but I can’t find anything.
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All the karaoke places I’ve ever seen play midi files (or some equivalent), so no, no vocals. There’s the karaoke subtitles that you can read/sing along to.
Many/most major domestic releases have a vocal track option in the interface, typically sung by someone else due to rights issues. (https://www.clubdam.com/sound/guidevocal/) Also “dictating the singing tempo” is also done with the melody track whose volume you can adjust individually.
I think it depends on the song. Most of the time, the anime songs I usually go for has a guide vocal (instead of guide melody). But I don’t think I’ve seen that option for English songs.
Pretty much all English songs – aside from some *extremely* popular western pop songs – will not have vocal accompaniment. Japanese songs are a different beast, they may have full vocal versions as well as backing vocal versions.
For English songs though… welcome to hard mode 🙂
>Does anyone know if this is the norm in Japan?
Isn’t it the norm anywhere? Its the Kara in Karaoke after all.
Japanese songs will sometimes have a version with the vocalist. But honestly I hate them, the whole point is to sing.
Trying to sing whilst the artist’s voice plays over the speaker sounds bloody awful
I think I’ve seen karaoke with real vocals options, but those are for Japanese songs. But considering how some karaoke background music are even remade midi and not the original one, I suppose it’s much more expensive to have to pay for the rights of the original vocal track as well.
I sing Japanese songs all the time and I’ve never had any voice over (unless the official instrumental already includes back vocals/choir). I think there’s a vocal guide option sometimes but in my opinion that would take away all the fun to use it.