My sister is a really good singer. She has always had perfect pitch and the ability to harmonize with any song possible. She sung quite a bit with the church choir and even busted out a lovely tune at my wedding while she was making her speech. We sang together all the time as kids, but I have always known that she is a much better singer than I am and that is just the way it is.
When I realized she was visiting soon after I got the Karaoke Revolution game for Xbox, I was very excited. I love singing with her and this game has a singing contest and even options for duets.
I played the game by myself the weekend before her visit, and although I would not say I was practicing, I knew how it worked and had a few songs memorized. I figured this would give me the at-home advantage when it came to competing. Wrong! One of the game options is you both sing a song simultaneously, but are graded as individuals. There is a meter that grades pitch, crowd pleasers and another grading point is if you know all the words. She smeared my ass all over the place as we both busted out �Time After Time�, a song I had probably sung ten times in a row a few days earlier, but one she probably had not even heard in 20 years. The only hope I had was when she would lose points for harmonizing, which actually made the song better, but the game is not smart enough to interpret that.
Getting my vocal skills burned up by my sister was to be expected, it was when her husband beat me that really smarted. My sister�s husband is on the subdued side. I figured having us play the game would drive him nuts and I never dreamt in a million years that he would want to play with us, but after 4 pomegranate martinis, he was throwing down like a total fucking rock star!
I tried to sing the Eagle Eye Cherry song �Save Tonight�, but I did not know the song very well, especially in such a low pitch and I got literally booed off the stage! This is a fun game, but can be a bit of an ego bruiser, too.
On other songs I did much better and Sasha got into it as well. It became totally addicting. You create a character that dances around on stage in different venues. You can win gold or platinum records and the better you sing the more songs you can unlock.
We did 4-person contests, where you each pick a different song to sing and compete against each other and then we switched over to duets. My sister and her husband sang �Endless love� together and it was so beautiful, I wanted to cry. My sister and I sang Blondie�s �Call Me� and both did awesome, even when it came to the part where Blondie sings in French. It was when my sister and I tried to sing �Uptown Girl� by Billy Joel that everything fell apart. This was a duet that actually had separate parts for each singer, the lead and the back-up. Naturally she was the lead, but when I tried to do back-up, I could not even come close to singing in the correct tune. The results were the horrible sound reminiscent a dying gray wolf under a full moon while having his guts ripped out by a drunken buzzard. My sister started laughing so hard, she literally peed in her pants and then tossed her microphone to her husband to try and save it, but it was too late, we got booed off the stage. Total fucking hilarious fun. Best time I have had in a long while.
We were all dreaming karaoke all night long.