Across several global contexts there are increasing pressures to regulate private tutoring services outside of schools, including the informal practices of musician-teachers in the community. Any process of standardisation or professionalisation leads to questions of how the roles of musician-teachers are understood and what is expected of their work - artistically, educationally, or otherwise. Who gets to decide within these related processes of research, leadership, and policy-setting, then, brings about a discussion of power and how musician-teachers are produced as subjects.In this paper presentation, I draw on my PhD thesis to philosophically re-consider what ‘being teacher’ and ‘being professional’ means for musicians who work in liminal, unregulated spaces. Within societies of control, Deleuze considers power to be distributed beyond the spatial confines of any singular institution. Together with Guattari’s expanded notion of subjectivity - across the three ecologies of the environmental, social, and human - it is possible to differently conceptualise the roles that musician-teachers occupy beyond the school walls.Following years of personal experiences working in Southeast Asia, an autoethnographic illustration is worked through these Deleuzoguattarian concepts. Far from being idealised as autonomous freelancers, musician-teachers might be subject to the control of parents, international examining bodies, and a whole network of actors connected to their teaching practices. While this starts from a deficit orientation, the project is nonetheless an affirmative one. By dismantling assumptions around ‘being teacher’, a universal vision of the subject gives way to one that is more in touch with relationalities and contingencies. Rather than locating musician-teachers within fixed identity positions, they can be considered to move between them—as transversal subjects. This transversal movement emphasises a collective form of subjectivity and the potential for musician-teachers to operate within dynamic systems, rather than structures that are simply over-regulated in the name of ‘being professional’.Supporting the work of musician-teachers is therefore not about exacting policy from the outside, but tending to the complexities of their lived experiences through a transversal approach. With a focus on relational ethics and decolonising research methods, critical attention is drawn to how decisions are made to begin with, necessitating a shift from the abstract to the ecological.