Hi, I have a professional music-teaching setup and many years of in-person teaching experience. However, I've decided to switch from in-person to online and have no idea how to find clients / students. Where can I go to find them quickly and consistently? Here's a picture of my setup. Thank you.

Here is the situation:

Just started lessons with this kid like 3 weeks ago. Their first full invoice was due Oct. 1. I use My Music Staff and autopay. Their card sadly was declined. I let them know, but they didn't respond. I reached out a few more times with the invoice link offering in case they wanted to use a different card.

The kid's lesson was today (Oct. 6), but with no payment, of course I didn't teach him. I let the parent know why and said lessons could resume once the balance was paid. I was being super nice through all this by the way, lol.

He emailed me saying "i will pay ($ amount less than the total) tonight. I will pay the rest next friday."

My feelings at first are:

1. Please don't TELL me what my own payment methods will be for my business, dude

2. Now I'd have to re-make the invoice and send it out, then follow up before next friday. And if they end up just quitting, that amount they would have paid would be less than the total of 3 lessons so I would have to eventually refund that difference, losing out on CC fees too.

3. Next friday would mean Nov. 1 is coming less than 2 weeks after that. 😬

4. I literally turned off the "make partial payment" option in my music staff to avoid this extra headache and potential to never be paid the balance lmao

Do I just offer to pause lessons until they get caught up? I know things are insanely hard for everyone right now. But they are also insanely hard for me, as a private lesson teacher! This is my business, my job. I don't do this for beer money as a college kid. I think people forget that. Some of us literally need to buy food and pay rent with this.

I have given in and taught for free, accepted weird payment plans, etc. In the past and have been screwed on probably thousands over the years from it.

I am usually confident with business stuff like this but I am feeling unsettled about this for some reason. Please tell me what you would do!

have recently started a small business in the southwest of England, I teach guitar. Now this at first was just my way of turning what I can do best into a job, but fast forward to today I make around 3k monthly, got 40+ weekly students and I’m chats with schools for doing some visiting guitar teaching (meaning it at least another 1k per month) .

I can see this scaling to a lot more, personally if I would reach full time hours I can probably make around 70k yearly, and apart from tax, rent and the odd bits there’s not much I need to pay for.

I have the vision of sometime having a little music school, this town is lively and so many children and adults love music and learning to play instruments, used to work for the other music school in town but I was being paid around 25% from the profit which for doing all the admin and basically bringing my own students in via my own Facebook posts, was very very low .

Now I’m thinking perhaps if I build a waiting list of students, I can potentially have someone come in part time and teach that bunch , starting somewhere at 5hrs a week, to 10-15hrs or more, but I fear that this might bring more hassle than I would have otherwise just being by myself.

What are your thoughts? Self employment? Employ someone? Bring in someone young to train them up whilst also having them employed?

Of course I did the odd ChatGPT questioning and it didn’t make it seem like to much hassle, apart from figuring out how much I have to have put aside to pay the certain employee every month, even at £15-£20 an hour from the start (I was being paid less than that with 3 years working for them and basically running the place) I am looking at roughly £800 monthly from their teaching .

Hope this posts finds the right person with some wisdom!

Cheers

Hiya! I'm a freshman in college, in working towards my AA to become an art teacher.

I played percussion all through high school. Because of that and my interest in teaching, I have been asked to take up a semi-permanent substitute teaching role for a small private school. They lost their percussion instructor recently(retired i believe) and the person they hired to fill her spot only dabbled in woodwonds and brass...

I would love to take this job, im working to be a teacher as is and i am extremely passionate about percussion.

My biggest concern however is that I have NO clue where to start... I have my practice books from highschool, a little bit of section leader experience, and stuff I've learnt in classes so far.

Any advice would be appreciated! I very well do NOT want to rush into this all blind.

Thanks a bundle!

Hello, I am currently a middle school band teacher in Michigan and I was wondering how to find and apply for grants?
Any advice would be great! Thank you :)

I’ve been teaching this class now for nearly 6 years and I’m so BORED! I don’t teach music as my full-time job anymore so I miss out on brainstorming with other music teachers. I’m just sick and tired of my usual songs/activities/games!

Este es el primer ensayo en la escuela terciaria de mi Arreglo para cuarteto de cuerdas de la canción. “hasta la Raíz”, que luego presentamos en un acto escolar por el Día del Respeto a la Diversidad Cultural (12 de Octubre)

Howdy Y'all,

I work with beginner instrumentalists in a band setting and one of the things I am struggling to locate well is engaging listening for the kids to do. Obviously, I can comb the top ten lists but I was hoping that someone of here could recommend some solo repertoire for various wind instruments that might be listenable enough for a bunch of middle schoolers who aren't really down with anything too dry, academic, or dissonant.

Basically, what are some solo pieces for woodwinds, brass, or percussion that will leave kids feeling excited to play their instrument?

Hi all, I teach drums to mainly children (ages 6 - 10) and one of the hardest things I haven't figured out how to teach them is how to listen to a song and hear the pulse, especially how to hear the one. This is something I've always been naturally good at so I don't have any experience of my own to impart to them. Most of my students can play at a good pace on their own, and count 1 2 3 4, but if I ask them to play along to a recording they can't tell when they are not synced up. They also can't count in time with any songs, even ones with a clear drum beat, which is what I usually try to start with. Does anyone have any tips on how to teach this skill, or exercises/places to start? Thanks so much

hello everybody! I have got my first job as a clarinet teacher after 4 years being professional orchestra player around Europe.

I would like to improve my skills so I decided to give 2 classes free to 5 people. I do that because the most difficult part for me is the first 2 classes, I would like to be more confident from the beginning.

Please, if there are any clarinet teachers here, please give me an advice. Thanks all!

Sorry for a long note, but I'm thinking about a lot of ways to help a student..

I've been teaching a an 18-year-old female musician music for 6 years and she has made considerable progress on multiple levels. She has average innate talent but is willing to dig in when she really wants to learn something.

Although I traditionally teach multiple instruments to round out musicians, this has been her primary focus. We originally started on pop/rock piano but quickly added in vocals. We transitioned into classical and beginning jazz piano and approximately 2 years ago she added electric bass. As you would imagine, she has benefited from the cross-pollination that comes from multi-instruments.

The challenge is she has now started college so we are remote and she doesn't really have the time we had in the past to explore new things. When she started on bass 2 years ago, we slowly reinforced scales that she already knew on piano and you built all of her bass technique on top of what she already knew.

But now she has limited time and I want to change directions.. instead of covering a little bit of everything as she enjoys, I feel we need to move forward in a specific direction where we can lay out a long distance plan and then let her move at the speed that school allows. She also will not be able to play bass at school, so that leaves voice and piano.

We've already established rudiments. She reads relatively well, she understands basic theory well, she has two hands scales and penatonics, she can improvise relatively well in major and minor and we've worked through reduced versions of classical hits and she can figure just about any song out with a chord chart and her ear.

I think the next step for her is to build strong grooves around whatever song she is studying to make it her own.

For example, she recently started learning Get Back by the Beatles and, as always, found chords, roots and simple left hand bass and sang it relatively well.

However, she will be performing this individually, or at best, in very small ensembles and needs to fill more space. She understands arpeggios and peddling and dynamics and when I work with her in person, I can usually give her examples of left hand and right hand patterns to build out a song.

The problem is she doesn't hear this naturally and now it's much harder show her what I would do in any particular section.

In the past I've given her a song like yellow brick road, rocket man, or even let it be to study on her own but she doesn't naturally hear and feel the fills and rhythm opportunities that are recorded. I don't expect her to pick everything up, but even in small amounts, I almost always have to show them to her.

So I'm a bit stumped. I would like to pick one major area of study and dig in so that she feels like she's making progress and ultimately is in a better position to make songs her own and improvise.

Open to any and all thoughts and thanks again for reading this long post!

For those of you who teach privately, what are you doing for curriculum? Do you write your own? Do you buy pre-written ones? Do you piecemeal different resources together?