This paper presents a karaoke system employing a vocal region detection algorithm based on the vocal characteristics. In the proposed system, an input song is classified into vocal and instrumental regions using the vocal region detection algorithm. Then, a vocal removal method is applied only to the vocal region. To detect vocal region, a classification algorithm is designed based on the vocal characteristics in the TICFT (twice iterated composite Fourier transform) domain. For vocal removal, vocal components are extracted from a band pass filtered vocal region and they are subtracted from the original song, yielding a vocal removed song. The performance of the proposed method is measured on four different songs.