Making Money

One of the main reasons I decided to stay in Atlanta instead of moving to either Bloomington or California was that I felt my fairly strong list of connections here in my hometown would make it easiest for me to get some sort of freelance career rolling. Sure enough, the vast majority of my current money-making engagements are through connections. My gigs at the moment include the following:

Teaching Privately
I currently have one composition/theory student, one guitar student, and four piano students, all of which I found through personal promotion via flyers I put in private mailboxes in local neighborhoods.

Teaching at NAC
One day a week I teach three piano students at a Korean school in Johns Creek (one of the distant suburbs of Atlanta). The 45-minute drive is a bit of a pain, and the pay isn't nearly as good as with teaching privately, but all of my lessons are back to back, so it's not so bad. Plus, they've been continuously getting me new students, so pretty soon this might be significantly more lucrative.

College-Prep Theory Teacher for ASYO
My best-paying gig (at least rate-wise) is teaching a quasi-AP Theory class to some of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra's potential music majors. The only negative to this job is that it's semester-based, so if after Spring semester we don't come up with another class for me to teach in the Summer, I'm not going to be generating any income from this job until next Spring.

Random Gigging
Like any freelance musician, I'm always up for taking random one-off gigs such as playing piano for parties, DJing, working with the UGA CORE Modern Dance Company, copying work, and whatever else might come my way.

Dance Class Accompanying
Although this hasn't yet begun, I'm scheduled to start accompanying for a weekly dance class run by my friend and collaborator, Beth Lewis. Accompanying in this context is actually better described as live free improvisation with a pulse, which I always find really fun.

Piano Class Instructor
Although this is just starting to get off the ground, I have been hired as the piano class instructor for the Breve Music Centre (also in Johns Creek) where I'll eventually be teaching older adults piano in classes of a maximum of eight students. One atypical side to my job description is that I'm also in charge of recruiting my students from a list of local Active Adult Communities. Thus far, nothing has been set in stone yet, but we're still working on it.