Malnack on Tom Becka's Show KFAB

Becka: Listen to this music for awhile, listen to this.
The band is called Malnack and my guest is Brent Malnack who is obviously leader of the band.
That's your wife singing right?

Malnack: It is.

Becka: The intersting thing about this music, first of all the quality is just great. What I find so interesting about it though is that this is all done by musicians that have never met each other.

Malnack: Right. I have a home studio. We recorded a little demo version of it where I played all of the parts and my wife sang a sample track. And then through the internet we shared tracks with other musicians in different cities around the country and one guy was in London. They took the tracks and replayed some of my parts with their part and we put it all together and we had what we call the 8,000 mile song because all of the participants, the distance between them and Omaha is 8,000 miles.

Becka: Now how does this all work out, OK so you do the demo and then again back in the day you did a demo in the studio. Now with technology on your home computer you can pretty much turn your home into a recording studio.

Malnack: Right.

Becka: And so you do the recording there, you do the demo. How do you hook up with these musicians that you didn't know?

Malnack: In some cases we've tracked them down because we knew them, we used to be in a band in the eighties and we had some contact to the music industry, loosely still. But some of it, there's a site called eSession.com that's kind of a portal for musicians that, and very well known people that you can hire to play a track. So in some cases I'm hiring players that have played with everybody.

Becka: So did you recently hire these guys or did they all become part of the project? How does this work?

Malnack: In some cases, we've done 4 songs now and in some cases it's been friends or people we've known and it's been a free thing. But in some cases we've hired musicians to play a part and the technology that they have is amazing. They can get just incredible recording quality so when we mix all the parts together, they're experts at doing their individual sounds. The drummer has a fantastic studio in Nashville. I don't know that we could go to any studio in town without a lot of effort and get the quality that he's built to give all day long.

Becka: Now how would this process to put this song together be if you went to a studio and hired the musicians and everything. How much would that cost versus doing the way that you did it online?

Malnack: It's amazingly inexpensive compared to what it used to cost. In the eighties when recorded the hours of studio time were hundreds of dollars per hour.That was just for your own band, that didn't include any extra stuff and you were nervous about someone taking a long bathroom break because it was so expensive. But now, these musicians are very inexpensive. I got to work with the bassist from Dishwalla that just went back on tour again. It was incredibly cheap.

Becka: Now let me ask you, what do you do now, you got the songs and they sound great, but how do you market it? How do you get this out now with having, again, you have no record contract, no distributor, not the way that it used to be done, so what do you do now?

Malnack: We've worked through a middle man company that allows us to put our songs on iTunes, Amazon, and Rhapsody and all those types of sites. It's kind of nice the record label is not really needed for that part of the mechanism anymore, they're needed for the promotional part which we're finding. And you know, getting the book out (Tom Becka just released a book), there's all kinds of aspects of that that are complicated, but we're starting to find our way and it's a lot different than we thought, but we're having a little success in Japan. We're getting a little airplay, we've got kind of an eightie's sound and that's still kind of a real popular thing in Japan. But, you know we're learning as we go. We're going to keep doing songs.

Becka: If someone wants to hear more of the music, they want to find out more about this, have you got a website?

Malnack: Yeah, they can go to malnack.com or they can find us on iTunes by typing in malnack, or Amazon. Through various sites, you'll hear full previews of the songs.

Becka: Does it freak you out a little bit, I mean like I said, first you put the song together with all of these artists not knowing each other and then you put it together like this, and now you're on iTunes and again with no record label and people like you say, buying your stuff in Japan, buying your stuff overseas, an you know, with like virtually no radio play, and again the whole paradigm with this is completely out the window isn't it?

Malnack: Yeah, it's strange and we just got ourselves on Clear Channel through the NOW thing that KFAB has and you know it was something, it was a vehicle that we weren't aware of, so people can go to KFAB or on our our website we have a link directly to the KFAB thing and they can stream the song there. So it is a different deal, the whole social networking music thing is very strange and you know, we're learning.

Becka: The song is called?

Malnack: One Man's Ghost.

Becka: One Man's Ghost, the band is Malnack and Cam let's hear a little more of this here.