Karaoke at the Distillery

The Distillery at 2107 “L” st, Sacramento hosts karaoke Sunday thru Thursday starting at 9pm and ending at 1am. The karaoke show is run by DJ service New Dimension Sound and hosted by KJ Rob Lewallen. KJ Rob runs the show off of a small laptop, a Mackenzie sound mixing board, and portable Yamaha speakers. The New Dimension songbook is 282 pages long and the company claims to have over 50,000 songs in their selection. There is a good representation of every music genre available for selection. The only two areas that are lacking a little in selection are heavy metal and jazz. The typical customer crowd at The Distillery is small and made up of mostly college students. On an average night you will hear a mix of rock, pop, easy listening, and calypso music. A person joining the singing rotation at the beginning of the night and staying until the end will sing an average of six times.

KJ Rob is courteous about answering questions from new singers and is willing to sing duets with those who do not have partners. However he does not appear to do any actual mixing for each singer. On more than more occasion KJ Rob would start the song and then just walk away without adjusting the sound volume or anything else, even with new singers. They have one bartender working named Angel and no waitresses. Bartender Angel is polite, helpful, and friendly. Instead of only staying behind the bar she will go out to the tables to check on customers and serve drinks. However she does not seem to be very knowledgeable about different mixed drinks.

Over all it would be easy to recreate the experience at The Distillery by picking up a case of beer and playing Rockband at home with some friends.