Record Producer Bill Moriarty and his manager Chris Radwanski use Highrise to keep track of all of Bill's album projects. Bill tells us all about it below.
Why do you need Highrise?
I'm in the studio most of the time so my phone's off, the internet's off... I'm making sure the tape machine's running right and the band's playing their best.
My manager, Chris, deals with all the communications, logistics and a lot of planning on every album I make. With Highrise I can login and see all the progress that's been made toward getting a band in the studio and then follow up with the artist about the music we're going to make.
Despite living in the same city we rarely see each other in person, we barely have meetings, we don't have conference calls, we don't do IM… Highrise is where everything goes. It's how Chris & I stay in sync with what was said, what was promised, potential projects, and where I'm currently in an album's progress. If we worked only in email all these vital communications would just be lost in the email noise. Using Highrise makes us focus just on what's important to making records and running our company.
Which features do you use most?
We actually use Cases the most. Since it's just two of us we don't need the full project management of Basecamp. Besides individual contacts we make a "Company" for each band and a "Case" for each album. Everything important that gets said about an album goes into the album's "case."
On average, Chris is working with 15 potential records at a time. He titles it, oh, for example, "lead:Drink Up Buttercup's new album" and uploads demos for me to listen to, notes about how the band wants to make their album, possible recording dates, where in the world this may be recorded, and assigns me todo's for when & how to get back to the artist about their project. Once that lead becomes a definite project we just delete "lead:" from the Case's title.
We have contacts and companies for the artists, labels, and musicians we speak with regularly. On DHH's blog advice we don't put everyone in Highrise; just the people that matter to running our business. Again, it's about focusing on what's important: doing one thing at a time and doing it well.
What did you use before and why did you switch?
I used to use Daylite. A few months into it I realized I don't want to maintain a huge database. It was asking for so much information and offered so many parameters I thought if I didn't fill them in I'd be missing some crucial business success tool. Nope. Pretty soon I dreaded opening Daylite, updating its database became just another chore and inevitably it simply didn't get updated. It became useless. Highrise has been the opposite: quick to use, no learning curve, we use what features we want, it always works.
Tell us a story about a project or situation where Highrise helped you out.
I really like having Highrise online. It doesn't matter what part of the world I'm in or that my Powerbook just died. Nothing's lost, nothing's inaccessible. I'm working on around 10 albums at various stages simultaneously. Every album produces a myriad of emails and phone calls. Having to tell each other what was said would slow us down and lose information. It's simple… talk to a band member, put it in Highrise, Chris & I are in sync on 25 albums.
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