(a) karaoke song(s) for people who don’t have great voices?
(b) what about some suggestions for people who DO have great singing voices?
I’ll start off with (a) Jackson Brown - Somebody’s Baby
It starts off fairly easy and is more about cadence in the verses. The Chorus and Bridge hit a little bit high but you can start in a different key to account for that.
(b) Boz Scaggs - What can I say?
Tough song to sing but the song just lends itself to improvisation which is fun if you can pull it off.
Good points about these two tracks is that they don’t drag on at the end which can be karaoke poison, just standing up there for 40 seconds of not singing while people are looking at you.
Well, there’s always Cher’s “Believe” which seems to consist of only three notes. Maybe slightly more but there’s really no range to it nor reason to raise the roof.
I sing and play guitar at ‘campfire sing-along’ talent level, and my voice has a pretty limited range. So I find that I can always pull off Tom Petty songs reasonably well. Petty has a lot of great, catchy songs that are all pretty easy to sing, because his voice was on par with Dylan’s.
Come to think of it, Dylan songs for the same reason.
“Cliffs of Dover” is one of my all-time-favorite instrumentals! Makes me smile (and wish I could play the guitar) every time.
I’m a good singer; some would say very good. I’m a female with an alto/soprano-ish range, but my top two karaoke go-tos are male vocals: Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (always a crowd favorite!), and Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” Some people assume that a woman will do Barbra Streisand’s version, but I love Billy and his key is perfect for me (plus I’m not a Barbra fan).
A lot of Led Zeppelin works, as a female I am good with the higher range that gets hit, but if you catch one of his post 2010 concert videos his voice doesn’t have the clear highs, but is still very doable for most people.
There are songs just made for singing karaoke with a few friends, with the crowd eventually joining in. One of those is You Never Even Call Me By My Name.
Whatnis the nature of the singer’s problem? Is it range? Or pitch? Or poor dynamics/inflection or something? There are quite a few songs that are easy to sing, but have high parts that require some range. I find most people who fail at Karaoke pick a song they like, and can sing the chorus okay, but eitherbthey don’t actually know the music in the verses as well as they thought, or the song has high or low parts they can’t hit - but try anyway.
If it’s just pitch, pick a talkin’ song like most of 'Devil Went Down To Georgia". If it’s range, just find a singer who has the same range and do their stuff. Kris Kristofferson, for example, is a poor singer with very limited range. Good songwriter, though. But his songs should be easy enough. And even if you aren’t great, you’re probably singing it better than Kristofferson did…
