Hi everyone, I'm Gabriel

Hi everyone, and greetings from sunny Malaysia!

My name is Gabriel and I'm new to Steemit! This is, in fact, my very first post here.

I wanted to say a quick hello and tell you a little bit about myself, as I'm really looking forward to being a part of this great community.

I'm an Australian musician based in Kuala Lumpur.

But how did I end up living here? Let me try to explain.

I used to conduct self-funded concert tours quite regularly through SE Asia. I started touring here because I was growing frustrated with how far apart the towns and cities in Australia were situated from one another. Touring back home was expensive and required long periods of time behind the wheel of a car. In the time it takes to drive from Melbourne to Sydney, for example, I could instead drive from Malaysia to Thailand!

While touring, I found that in every place I visited - from Vietnam to Singapore to the Philippines - there was a bustling scene of independent artists/musicians/film makers/photographers eagerly and prolifically creating and sharing wonderfully diverse works of an incredibly high standard. And they were all extremely welcoming to anybody who, like myself, wanted to share his or her craft with them.

After several of these tours, I found myself living in Bangkok for a couple of years. I was hired to sing jazz standards at one of the city's best known clubs, five nights a week. This was a big change for me as I was really only accustomed to performing my original songs up until that point.

I learned a lot from the experience and developed my skills as a performer, but I wasn't able to flex my creative muscle as much as I had in the past. I really missed playing my own tunes! The lifestyle also got the better of me and I found myself becoming quite overweight and unhealthy - working nights for a year, coupled with a lot of alcohol and fast food will do that to you!

As luck would have it, I found a way out of that situation when I reached out to a recording studio I had visited during previous tours to help me record an album. The studio, based in Kuala Lumpur, survived by doing audio post-production and jingles work, but the owner (a wonderful man named Paul) has always been passionate about producing albums by musicians he believed in.

For some reason, he believed in me and my music. He helped me to record an album. So for a year, I traveled back and forth from Bangkok to KL and chiseled away at producing the record.

By the time we were finally preparing to release it, Bangkok was going through political turmoil. There had been a military coup and tourism was suffering. So too were the hotels and clubs. Live music and entertainment was suffering a great deal.

I asked Paul if his team might have room for a new in-house composer at his KL studio. Shortly thereafter I was relocating to begin my internship under his tutelage and learning how to use software and synths to produce all kinds of music for all kinds of purposes. I've been composing ever since with my music appearing in commercials and even some local movies!

I earn a humble living doing this work, but the main perk of the job is that I have a studio at my fingertips to work on my own music whenever I'm not tasked with a commission. I'm also surrounded by a passionate team of people who give me the flexibility I need to continue to perform and promote my own original music.

I have lofty hopes of one day fulfilling a dream and conducting a tour of the USA - even if that means just playing in a whole bunch of half-empty coffee houses in any small town that will have me!

I'm looking forward to contributing some vlogs, blogs and, of course, some music to the community here at Steemit. I'm also really looking forward to participating in some great discussions with artists of all disciplines who come here to hang out and share their work.

I didn't want to treat this post as a plug for my music, because I would rather get to know more of you first. All I will say is that if you are interested in hearing some of what I do, all you need do is search me by name.

Nice to meet you! And thanks for taking the time to read my little introduction!