It turns out our family loves karaoke. Any reason at all, from birthday parties to dates to just because, we’ll take it and sing our hearts out. Well, now we don’t even have to leave our house.

This is part of our 100 Things in 2017 challenge. Click on the photos for a closer look!

And it wasn’t even really that expensive. When I started researching gear, I expected it to be unrealistically expensive, but all you really need is a microphone or two and a small mixer. I agonized over this for a while, trying to puzzle out how all the pieces would fit together.

After some trial and error, we ended up with a really great setup. I went a little bigger on hardware, and got four wireless mics and a biggish mixer, so we could travel or put on a live performance of a band or something (you never know).

For software, it took a couple of tries, but we ended up subscribing to KaraFun, which is just perfect for us: you pay $10 per month and you get access to their software (which is great) and a catalog of over 25,000 songs, all fully mixed so you can adjust the tempo, key, and volume of the main vocals (individually for duets).  It runs from a laptop plugged into the TV, but you can search for and queue up songs from a smartphone, just like at Voicebox!

Will helped us break it in on one of his visits home, and it was a central feature at Lucy’s sleepover birthday party. So now we’re that karaoke family!