Hey, thanks a ton for the detailed response. If I was ever moved, I'd consider trying it out. I was sorta curious how great the demand for new guys is, how great the turnover was, how many pianists are employed at a given time, etc., but just out of curiosity.

My wife has a job she loves, and she's also a fantastic musician, so we do a lot of duet stuff in addition to me playing with various bands in a variety of styles on trumpet and piano. She also does some light freelancing on the side. Heck, the biggest thing about leaving would be the networking stuff. No doubt I could redo it all, but I've gotten so embedded in the network here, I'd hate to leave.

I'm guessing you do a lot of running common progressions through lots of keys. I'm also sure you have to have a lot of stylistic diversity, which I'm always preaching at people who want to freelance. What styles give you the most trouble? I would imagine a lot of Nicki Minaj doesn't translate well. What about tunes that don't really have a lot of harmonic context, but more rhythmic and sort of sound-effecty bits? Stuff like "All The Single Ladies" where it's so dry in terms of pitch outside of the tiny bits of vocal harmony.

Your rehearsal structure sounds much like most of the groups I play with learn the song in rehearsal, then just play it so damned much that it gets polished to the point that you could sleep through it. The exception is the big band type stuff... sightreading on the edge of your seat with no rehearsals

I have to say, I'm so bad at lyrics. I swear I'm almost lyric deaf. I'll have known and loved a song for years and not be able to sing half of the lyrics. I regularly have to sing and it's always a pain for me to learn lyrics. It's usually many days in the shower singing it over and over with iReal Pro or something to learn them. It's harder to learn lyrics than to learn changes for me.

Thank again for the great reply and for your post in general. Really awesome, informative stuff here and it's just nice to hear from other working musicians every once in a while since it seems like such a different world than most of the musicians I actually know from college or who are band director buddies. They literally don't even understand what I do.