Most personal-website "about" pages bury the actual person under a wall of brand language. I'll try not to do that. Here is the basic shape of who's writing this.
I live in Western New York, in the broader orbit of Buffalo, where I have spent enough Tuesday nights in dive-bar karaoke rooms over the last decade and a half to qualify as a regular at three of them and a polite stranger at maybe a dozen more. By day I work as a software engineer at a small, decidedly non-musical company. By night, when the mood and the calendar permit, I am the person who shows up to your birthday party with a Shure SM58 in a tote bag.
How I got here.
The bug bit in 2010. I was 26, freshly broken up with somebody I'd thought I might marry, and a friend dragged me to a karaoke bar on Hertel Avenue called Skylark — long since closed — on the theory that I needed to be somewhere loud and not alone. I did not want to sing. I had never sung in front of strangers. I went up around midnight, did "Take Me Home, Country Roads," butchered the second verse, and watched twenty people I had never met sing the chorus louder than I did. I got off the stage feeling something I had not felt in months, which was the specific lightness of having survived a thing you were afraid of.
I went back the next week. And the week after. And then I went to a karaoke night in Osaka in 2013 because I had to be in Japan for work and could not believe I was going to be in Japan for work and not do karaoke in Japan, which would be like going to Italy and skipping the food. The Japanese version is different — private rooms, smaller groups, less performance, more communion — and the night I spent in a 12-tatami-mat box in Namba with three colleagues and a Japanese coworker named Aki, doing a version of "Sukiyaki" that I will go to my grave being proud of, is the night I think of as the one that made karaoke a permanent feature of my life rather than a hobby that might pass.
Why I started this.
I started Karaokee in 2019 because every other karaoke "guide" online reads like it was written by somebody who has never actually held a microphone. The word "guide" had become a synonym for "thinly rewritten content with affiliate links to whatever Amazon was paying out that month for karaoke microphones," and the field had nothing in it that resembled a real human's accumulated opinions, told straight, with the bad takes as prominent as the good ones. So I started writing the version of the guide I'd wanted in 2010.
I write everything on the site myself. I do not run ads. I do not take sponsored posts. I do not have an affiliate program. The one outbound recommendation I make to a paid service — for making your own karaoke tracks — is based on what I actually use, and the page that talks about it is the only page on the site that links anywhere off of it. Everything else points inward, to the rest of what I've written, because what I've written is what I have to offer.
How the site is built.
Karaokee is hand-coded HTML and CSS, hosted on Neocities, updated whenever I have something worth saying. Neocities — for anyone who hasn't bumped into it — is a community of people who still believe in the older spirit of the web, when sites were built by individuals as personal projects rather than assembled from CMS templates by content marketers. I picked it for ideological reasons as much as practical ones. The site is small, slow-growing, and not optimized for engagement metrics. I'd rather it be read than scrolled.
What you'll find here.
Five sections, each one a little different in tone. The songs pillar is where I argue about the all-time karaoke canon. The singing pillar is the practical guide for non-singers. The gear pillar is where I tell you what to buy and what not to buy. The hosting pillar is for anyone running an event. The history pillar is the long-form love letter to Daisuke Inoue and the strange, wonderful invention he gave the world for free.
Underneath each pillar are deeper guides on more specific topics — vocal warm-ups, microphone reviews, decade-by-decade song picks, etiquette, party planning. That's what I'd call the rest of the field journal. I add to it when I have something to add to it. Some posts are years old and still relevant; some are recent and probably still rough.
If you find a mistake, see something I should have included, or want to argue with me about whether "Don't Stop Believin'" really is the platonic ideal of karaoke (it is), please drop me an email. I read everything, even when I don't reply quickly.
Thanks for being here. Pick a song.