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I saw this picture and the caption just came to me like magic.  (PS I <3 Hilary)

The San Jose Mercury news is once again having its Best Of Silicon Valley series, and we need your votes!  Follow the link below, and grace thier page with all the warm loving glow that only a true, dedicated boo fan can.   It's the last day to do so, so hurry up!

http://www.mercurynews.com/bestofsv

So for the last year or so I stopped taking bribes. Mostly because when you start taking them you get douchebags that think they own you, and nobody owns the toqmeister, no one.

The opposite end of this coin though were the singers that say they couldn't compete with the bribing system financially. So for my sake, and their sake, I stopped taking bribes.

What I've found in the last year however paints a very ugly picture of karaoke singers. You won't part with a dollar for a fair rotation, but in light of screwing your fellow singer over for a spot, you're more than happy to part with a buck, or two, or twenty, or $400. It's not just a reflection of the karaoke singers, but the karaoke industry as a whole.

I walk out night after night with anywhere between $4-10 now. Contrast this to my bribe days when I could count on a minumum of $100 going into my tipjar. I hate to say what the fuck, but seriously folks, what the fuck?

When I say a contrast to the karaoke industry as a whole, it seems like the pirating, cheating business's are the only ones making any real money right now. They're getting rewarded, where folks like myself who don't pirate just get the shaft.

The 7 Bamboo Songbooks are stored on google docs spreadsheets. Should be compatible with most browsers, including mobile phones.

Warning, Large files:

Songbook by artist

Songbook by title

I've been procrastinating on it for some time, sorry about that folks.  OK time to explain what happened...

The Beginning;

So a while back AOL had started its own competitor to youtube called Uncut.  I had made quite a few friends with various folks at AOL.  One of my friends markbach had visited the 7 Bamboo.  He was taken by my plight of trying to run the karaoke here above board without piracy.  I explained how our video system worked, and with his skill he could easily make it work with Uncut video so folks could access their individual videos.

Mark was kind enough to sit down and take some time out to do some coding to automate the entire process, and within weeks we were filling uncutvideo with content on a daily basis. 100 videos, 1000 videos, 10000 videos.  We had become a content producing machine.  Although 7 Bamboo didn't necessarily have 1 extremely popular video, we had enough people hitting the Uncut site that 7 Bamboo had become the most popular search term on the site.

Bad times for AOL

Sayoko told me the other day she was bringing in some contractors to do some changes to the stage, and I would need to be on hand to assist with moving any cable's, wires, etc during the construction.  We were also going to take this as an opportunity to move the speakers around.

Some time ago, I realized that our speaker placement isn't optimal at all.  While it may be fantastic for let's say, watching a movie, it makes life more difficult for KJ and singer alike.  I split the background music mix off on it's own to the stage speakers because of feedback, but that 10" sub woofer overpowers any singer with a 20db gain rating. Cutting the sub is no good either, because then the crowd just manages to get louder than the singer.

So my idea is to move all the speakers above the big TV in the far corner, including the subwoofer, and just do a straight mix to the speaker array.  My initial tests with 4 PM5's in that corner have been promising.  With -10db of gain on a stock Shure SM58 I noticed my voice was plenty louder, and clearer than it normally is on the system.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pcb5K2jl0pXFq6H0JVNXgdw

Sex it.

I started off as a customer at the 7 Bamboo Cocktail Lounge in 1998. It was a time of change for the 7 Bamboo. I read a review from around that time that said, "This is a place waiting to be discovered" Heh, if only the author knew at the time how prophetic their words would be.

It was great times though. The crowd was "Mostly Asian" as another reviewer put it. Mostly Asian meaning, mostly Japanese. That was fine with me, my best friend at the time is a hapa and I spent many years being force fed food by his grandparents to know just how nice Japanese folks are. I fondly recall Kay Hisatomi saying things to me like "God dammit Cortese, if you don't eat another plate, you can never come over here again!" The Japanese folks that hung out at 7 Bamboo during that period were awesome. I don't ever remember there being a fight even once inside the bar. People didn't smash stuff or knock over tables.

The karaoke was different then too. The Japanese would respectfully stay quiet for one anothers performances. You didn't have problems like mic thieves. We didn't need 240watts worth of studio monitors. Rotation was small, so we could wait a bit for our turns.