How RollHouse Mentor turned the Bomb Bar into a self service karaoke destination, with and Singa.
We spoke with Anthony, Director of Technology at RollHouse Entertainment, about how the family owned Ohio entertainment group built a self service karaoke experience inside their Mentor location's Bomb Bar. This one is a different beast than the private karaoke room at their Solon location. Same operator, same karaoke platform, entirely different model.
Meet the Bomb Bar
The Bomb Bar is RollHouse Mentor's flagship event space. It was built during COVID with a local artist friend, with two decommissioned World War II bomb shells suspended above the bar, an eclectic mix of industrial furniture, and a built in stage. During November through January the entire room transforms into one of Cleveland's best known Christmas pop up bars, voted number two in the region last year, with over 10,000 ornaments hanging from the ceiling, giant nutcrackers, and a giant Christmas tree.
"This place is packed during the weekends, but there's not much to do while you're in here. It's just more of a social gathering. We're hoping karaoke will add another element of fun to it."
That "not much to do outside of Christmas" question is what got the RollHouse team thinking about karaoke in the first place.
Why Singa
The Mentor rollout committee had already been evaluating attractions across the RollHouse footprint. Anthony was part of that group. Before landing on karaoke, the team had been trialing themed nights, outside DJs, and the occasional band to drive weekly traffic through the Bomb Bar. None of it was sticky enough for a weekly recurring program.
"We wanted something we could do more internally and try and drive on a weekly basis."
The evaluation shortlist included multiple karaoke providers. Singa won on fit.
"Honestly, we just liked Singa's vibe better. Singa had a better vibe with the people that we were talking to at Singa versus other companies. It just seemed like it was the right match for us."
The self-service setup
Unlike Solon, where guests book a private karaoke room by the hour, Mentor runs an open bar concept. Karaoke happens on the Bomb Bar stage in front of the whole room. That meant the setup needed a workflow that could handle strangers ordering songs from strangers, without giving guests direct control of the queue.
Anthony's team designed the flow around the bartender as the traffic controller:
- A stage with two wireless microphones that stay on all night, no swap out between singers.
- A main iPad running the Singa Pro, mounted behind the scenes for staff control and video distribution. Guests never touch it.
- A second tablet instance on the bartender's tablet. Guests walk up to the bar, tell the bartender what they want to sing, and the bartender adds it to the queue.
- Singa Radio playing in the background whenever the queue is empty, so the room is never silent.
- When a song lands in the queue, the singer steps up to the stage, the lyrics pop up on the screens, and they're ready to go.
"Since we do an open concept in here, it allows us to control a little bit. The bartenders being able to put people on the app is probably our best thing for our case here. And I love the radio, too, just because we're able to keep something going on in the background while there's nobody singing right now."
The tech stack
RollHouse Mentor already had a full building audio and video distribution system, controlled from a central iPad that Anthony's team uses to send any source to any zone. Adding karaoke was a matter of adding one more input to that matrix, not building a new system from scratch.
The path from the Bomb Bar main iPad to the whole building looks roughly like this:
- Main iPad in the Bomb Bar runs the Singa host app and outputs HDMI.
- Digital HDMI encoder takes that signal and pushes it across the building to the AV rack.
- Matrix switcher in the rack makes the Singa video available as a selectable source in every zone. The team can choose to display the karaoke feed at the Bomb Bar screens only, or extend it to the main bowling lanes and bar screens for exposure.
- Shure wireless microphones on the stage, with antennas routed up through the ceiling, feed a small audio mixer.
- A basic mixer from B&H, purchased for about 150 dollars, blends microphone input with the Singa Radio feed before that combined audio goes back into the main house AV system.
"I didn't do anything fancy. It didn't need to be fancy because our main mixer is the whole system itself. So this just needed to be a bridge, but I think I got this for 150 bucks off of B&H and it serves its purpose."
On the microphone choice, Anthony was direct.
"We use Shure microphones. That's just standard across our locations. We just have the best luck with Shure, especially in these big metal buildings. Signal to noise ratio is relatively low with Shure microphones."
Whole building distribution as a marketing tool
The most interesting layer of the Mentor build is not the karaoke setup itself, it's what the audio video distribution lets RollHouse do with it. Because the karaoke feed can be routed to any screen in the building, karaoke becomes marketing.
"We're able to put Singa all throughout the center. So we'll put the Singa monitors on in the bar or out on the main lanes to try and garner more interest from the people that maybe don't know that we're doing it in here or bowling. Just to get some more interest in it."
How difficult was integration
Anthony's summary matters especially for operators who do not have a director of technology on staff.
"This was way easier than some of the other brands we were looking at. And it's just being on an iPad. It's just pretty seamless. Even if you don't have a fancy tech stack like us, it's really not that difficult to integrate."
The Solon karaoke room went in for about 15,000 dollars all in. The Mentor setup is a smaller lift on top of the existing AV rig, primarily two Shure wireless mics, an HDMI encoder path from the Bomb Bar to the AV rack, and a 150 dollar bridge mixer.
Where the traffic is right now
Mentor karaoke launched in February, right after the Bomb Bar's Christmas pop up came down. The team saw weekly traffic starting to build before the summer slowdown kicked in.
"Summers are also tough for us because they're slow. But before the summertime ended, karaoke on a weekly basis was really starting to pick up over here. We were seeing more traffic over here. But naturally, as the seasonality of our business, we only have a couple lanes going right now during the summer times. When we ramp back up in September for our league season, karaoke should hop right back on track."
The seasonality note is useful context for any operator thinking about karaoke as a weekly driver. Karaoke follows the venue's traffic pattern, it does not create a new one.
What's next: karaoke inside the Christmas takeover
The Bomb Bar closes for a week every year to become the Christmas pop up. The whole ceiling gets 10,000 plus ornaments, a giant nutcracker, a giant Christmas tree, and the room stays packed through the holidays. Last year the karaoke gear was not installed until February, so the two programs never overlapped.
This year, they will.
"That's definitely on the docket this year, to figure out a way that we can integrate the karaoke with it. We're excited about that because the Christmas Bomb Bar does really well."
Adding a stage moment to a room that is already the most photogenic space in Cleveland during December is the kind of layered attraction that self service karaoke is uniquely good at. No booking required, no room turnover, guests can dip in for a song and get back to the tree.
The takeaway
RollHouse Mentor's Bomb Bar karaoke is a different template from the private room model at Solon. It is a bartender mediated, open stage program, built on top of an existing whole building AV system, using two Shure wireless mics, a Singa app on two iPads, and a mixer bridge that cost less than a decent office chair.
It answers a specific business question a lot of family entertainment centers face. What do you do with a beautiful multi purpose space when it is not hosting a private event, a DJ night, or a holiday takeover? For RollHouse the answer this year is karaoke, driven by the bar, promoted on every screen in the building, and ready to plug into the Christmas Bomb Bar as soon as the ornaments go back up.
"There's other karaoke bars and things, but I wouldn't consider them on our level as to where we're at."
