22 Remote-Working Tools For Keeping Your Studio Open During The Coronavirus Quarantine
Things are crazy for everyone right now. While I don't have all the answers or any sort of magic bullet, I do have some tools that will help you adapt, shift your studio to a 100% online business model, and hopefully assist in keeping your business afloat during the worldwide COVID-19 crisis.
Section 1. Tools For Staying Relevant Online
If you're planning on moving your studio to a 100% online business, the tools in this first section are more important than ever. Without these, you're going to spin your wheels, wondering why you can't get strangers to hire you.
Easy Funnels
Build A New Website
If you want a successful online business, a functional, easily-navigated, fully-mobile-optimized website is required. It's just table stakes at this point. You WILL be “Googled” by your potential customer at some point, so make sure you're ready for this. There are a million different ways you can build your website. Easy Funnels is the tool I built, use, and recommend. It's the tool I used in my free website creation bootcamp.
Tawk.To
Live Chat With Your Website Visitors
Let's say someone visits your website, but they have a question you failed to answer on the site? In most cases, you just lost a customer. This is why offering “live chat” on your website is not only a smart thing… it's damn near a requirement.
Now someone can ask a question directly on this live chat widget, and it will go straight to your phone for a real-time conversation. The best part? It's 100% free.
Better Proposals
Turn More Strangers Into Customers
A proposal is a great way to outline every single aspect of a project, from pricing, to what's included, to what's NOT included, what the timeline will be, and what the next steps are. Instead of simply sending an ugly copy/paste email to your client, the High-Class Proposal is a much more effective method. If you want a dead-simple way to “wow” your customers, this is it.
Zapier
One App To Rule Them All
The vast majority of the apps in the world do NOT work together. The non-technical way to explain this is that they all speak their own languages. This tool (Zapier) is like a translator that allows one app to communicate with thousands of other apps.
The reason this is amazing is because of the world of automation this opens up. One easy-to understand example is this: When someone pays their invoice through PayPal, you could get Zapier to send an Acuity link through your CRM so they can book studio time. Once they book studio time, you could get Zapier to tell your CRM to automatically send an onboarding questionnaire to your customer so you have all of the necessary info to get started. Nerdy, but highly-productive stuff to learn.
Canva
Keep Your Branding Fresh
If you want to build a relevant online presence, your branding needs to be professional, consistent, and memorable. Most of us don't have designers on staff to create stuff for us, so I use (and highly recommend) Canva for creating images for social media, advertising, logos, websites, and more. They have plenty of templates to start from for all of our design-challenged friends.
Section 2: Remote Recording Tools
The hardest-hit part of the recording industry has been the in-person tracking studio. Social distancing and mandatory quarantines has meant no more in-person sessions. This good news is that you can STILL salvage some of these sessions with two simple tools. They aren't free, but if these tools save you from losing out on thousands of dollars of session work, you should be happy to pay $25/mo (give or take) until this stuff is over.
AudioMovers + Zoom
Produce and Record Bands 100% Online
This blew my assistant and I away once we figured out this incredible combination of Zoom and AudioMovers. This allows you to jump on a video call with any client, and fully control their computer/DAW (allowing you to handle all of the tracking, comping, light editing, and plugin setup). From there, AudioMovers allows you to stream the lossless audio from their DAW to yours. Alternatively, you can just bounce it from your client's DAW and send the file(s) to yourself. Refer to the video above for more info about this system.
Splice Studio
Free, Easy, Remote Project Collaboration
This free tool works wonderfully with the AudioMovers+Zoom combo from above. You can essentially sync sessions with Splice so you and your clients can collaborate on the same session without screwing up your projects. There's also a version control feature that allows you to roll the project back to an earlier version, if needed. This is perfect for mixing and mastering engineers that are working with other audio professions and want an easy way to share entire sessions.
Note: This is only compatible with Ableton Live, Logic, Garage Band, Studio One, and FL Studio.
Section 3. Meeting & Scheduling Tools
Now that everything has to be done 100% online, these tools are more important than ever. I've included both free and paid tools here, so take your pick.
Zoom
Don't Let Social Distancing Keep Your From Face-to-Face Conversations
The most difficult part of moving to a 100% online studio is building trust with strangers in an online setting. People only want to hire people they know, like, AND trust. Zoom allows you to keep those face-to-face conversations alive in a low-latency setting. It also opens you up to 100% online recording sessions with the “remote control” feature (this works incredibly well with AudioMovers, a tool mentioned earlier).
Whereby
A Free Alternative To Zoom
If you want a great video-chat tool but don't want to spend money, this is a solid option. The best part is that it's 100% browser-based, so your clients don't need an account, and they don't need to download an app. The only negative is that it doesn't allow you to control the other person's computer (i.e. “remote control). This means you can't control a DAW on other end, which limits this tool to live video calls and isn't a great option for remote session work.
Acuity
Book More Calls And Eliminate "Calendar Tag"
If you set up a lot of meetings, this is 100% necessary. No more “Hey does Wednesday at 3pm work for you? No? What about Friday at 9am? Oh damn you missed my email? Ok let's try 3pm next Tuesday?” With Acuity, you can simply send a link and they can choose from set times that you've chosen as available. If you add anything to your calendar, it automatically knows to block out meetings for that time. One other cool feature is the ability to collect payments. You could use this to book studio time and collect payments if you wanted.
Square Appointments
A Flexible Solution For All Your Booking And Payment Needs
This is the same deal as the tool above (Aquity) except it's free AND ties directly into Square payments. This is great if you want to set up a system where your clients are booking studio time directly on your calendar, and paying immediately. The only negative is that it's not quite as full-featured as Acuity.
Section 4: Tools For Getting Paid
The days of physical payments (i.e. cash and checks) are gone for now. This section will help you send invoices, accept payments, and put all of your hard work behind a Paywall.
PayPal
PayPal Payments
Chances are, you already have a PayPal account. Love them or hate them, they're the standard for payments in our industry. Very few people seem to know about this, but PayPal also has a free invoicing tool that allows your customers to pay via PayPal OR via credit/debit card.
GoCardless
Bank Transfers
I didn't realize this until I built an app of my own, but a lot of Europe does NOT use credit/debit cards for payments. If you want a cheap, easy way to accept bank transfers for your business, GoCardless is gaining in popularity.
The cool thing about them (other than only having a 1% fee as opposed to the standard 2.9% fee) is that they have a recurring billing option. If your clients pay you a set monthly fee, then this is perfect for you.
Stripe
Accept Credit Card Payments Through Stripe
Stripe.com is the poster child of small business credit card processing. They make it super easy for apps to integrate with them, so most apps that accept payments will integrate with Stripe (including several tools from this list). The only thing you need to do is create a free account. From there, you can link it to any of the other apps that offer Stripe support. This makes it incredibly easy for your customers to pay their invoices via credit card.
Square
Accept Credit Card Payments Through Square
This is Stripe's main competitor, however, they seem to be focused more on retailers and brick and mortar stores. The cool thing about Square (and the reason I'm adding the to this list), is that they have an entire ecosystem of tools they've built for small businesses like ours (their scheduling tool mentioned above, for starters). It's worth exploring.
Filepass
Put Your Files Behind A Paywall
Some of us work on projects we haven't fully been paid for. If you ever send work to your clients who still owe you money, Filepass makes it incredibly simple to put a “paywall” between your client and all the hard work you put into their project. They can stream their music, add time-stamped comments, and share with their band members… BUT they cannot download their files until they've paid. Once they pay you, their download automatically unlocks. Awesome.
5. Project management tools
Moving your business online means more tools, more moving parts, and potentially juggling multiple projects at the same time. These tools will help you stay organized, sane, and avoid “revision hell”.
Trello
Everyone's First Project Management Tool
This is what everyone seems to flock to for their first foray into project management. It's for good reason, however, because it's free and it works well. You can set up a project management system that's as simple or as complex as you prefer. If you're constantly dropping the ball, Trello is a fantastic place for you to stay on top of your projects.
Notion
All Of Your Notes, Spreadsheets, and Project Management In One Place
Notion is like a cross between Google Sheets, Evernote, and Trello. Their free plan is good enough to sustain mosts businesses like ours. I currently run 2 different businesses out of my Notion account without issue. This was my favorite new app addition to my business in 2019 when I started using it.
Filepass
Gather Time-Stamped Comments And Centralize Revision Requests
This is the second time Filepass has hit this list, and for good reason. Not only does the paywall feature help you protect your hard work, their file-sharing tool allows you to send music to your clients and collect time-stamped comments (with lossless streaming, btw). All of the comments turn into a nice-and-neat checklist for you to go through so you can mark revisions as “done” as you knock them out in your DAW.
6. Communication Tools
DO NOT make the mistake of trying to keep track of everything inside of social media messages, text messages, and email. These (free) tools help you organize the massive amount of communication required to successfully pull off online projects with multiple collaborators.
Slack
Chat-Based Collaboration That Eliminates Texts and Emails
If you have long-drawn out projects OR you regularly work with the same people on projects (partners, assistants, or other contractors), Slack has become the industry-standard communication platform. Create topic-based channels and keep all conversations where they can be easily found. It's like a cross between text and email, except it integrates with many of the apps you use every day.
Twist
It's Like Slack, But Better
Twist is what I use for one of my businesses, and it's incredibly productive. It's similar to Slack, where you can live-chat with your team. The big differentiator is that every channel has “threads” (think old-school message boards) instead of a constant stream of chats (think iMessage). You could easily create a channel for every single one of your active projects, invite your clients, and keep track of every single part of the project inside of Twist. It's free, so there's no use reading any more of this. Go sign up.
Marco Polo
Keep Your Relationships Alive
Marco Polo is a mobile app that essentially works as a “video walkie talkie”. You record a video for 1 or more of your friends. Those videos can be viewed live as you're recording them, OR they're queued up for your friends to watch whenever they get a chance.
This is the first (and only) “social media” app I'm adding to this list. The reason is twofold:
1. You need to keep your sanity through all of this. Cabin Fever is a real thing, and this is a great way to keep up with your friends and family.
2. This is a fantastic way to keep in touch with your clients after the project is over. People want to hire people they know, like, and trust. This is a fantastic way to build and maintain those relationships so they come back to you again… and again… and again.
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