Nowadays there are a multitude of products available to musicians, allowing them to efficiently organise their music-life. From setting up rehearsals to exchanging demos or simply moods, these band communication tools can act as time-saving cornerstones of proficient project management.
To help you get a picture of the possibilities, here are 4 tools that can help you out A LOT:
Whatsapp Think Tank
Whatsapp Group Chats work as a breeding ground for new ideas, quick rehearsal organisation and just overall band communication. You can set up groups in various categories, for example album songwriting, live communication, music production etc.
You can also collect live-pictures and videos, using Whatsapp as a sort of mobile archive, forwarding your audio-visual fragments to other platforms and working from there.
A lot of people are starting to skip large platform usage, like Facebook, being tired of information overload. Whatsapp is a great way of connecting via lighthearted messaging, keeping each-other up to date in realtime and via push-notification.
Be sure to set up your data-service properly and according to your plan, especially when sending song-moods and large videos.
Orchestrate your journey with Google Spreadsheets
Great gigs come with great responsibility – Organize your things with a strong tool like Google Spreadsheets.
Especially when planing tours, finance or production details, you should think about opening the process to various bandmembers, instead of just editing sheets by yourself on various files on your harddrive. You can achieve a great level of transparency by inviting your fellow musicans to overview current information concerning live- or production planning.
A great way of using spreadsheets is also sharing documents with certain trusted people you work with. Let your booker have access to your live sheet, and set up a joint-coordination of live activity. Open a production-sheet with your producers or songwriters and actively visualize where more works needs to get done, which projects are finished or in the final stages.
On the finance-side, spreadsheets is a great way sharing information with financial advisors or active participants in your budgeting process.
Todoist – the ultimate remember-it-all cheat
Todoist is a fun and hastle-free tool for staying on top of things. Don’t fall into the musicans cliche of getting lost in sonic endeavors. Don’t neglect the day-to-day stuff like presswork or plain deadlines. Use this tool to set up neatly organized to-do events, and make it a daily habit of checking them.
At the end of a month you’ll be sure to get a real kick out of realizing the amount of stuff you were able to get done, feeling good about the process while having a clear image of tasks you were able to work out.
Also – share your Todoist with certain bandmembers or set up shared lists to get larger projects done. Especially when working in hot phases of various creative processes, this tool can act as a helping hand, giving you more head-space for the creative process.
Communicative harmony with Slack
Slack is powerful real-time messaging service, used massively within the start-up scene. As as band you can profit from the extensive archiving and search-functions, it also has a great integration with other services such as dropbox.
Use it also to stay in close contact to your external team. Sorting the people you work with into different groups can help. Save time while staying organized and on top of things.
We hope this short introduction to band communication tools was helpful. If you use different products leave a comment and let us know about it.
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