Welcome to the "brilliant revolution" @benjamingroff.
Quite an impressive path you took. You will find many musicians here, me included (half of my work time is as an indie music producer). You know, the kind of musicians that live for and by music not those that get lured into these false dreams that pollute the Internet lol!
At least, up to now, after a month here, this is what I perceive.
Your paragraph about your first guitar made me laugh! Same story here, scraped every little franc to get my first e-guitar in the end 80s... It was a cheap crapy starshape one, but it was my first, and it placed my first foot in the live music world. Like you, a few months later, I was gigging regularly.
Wishing you a lot of fun in the Steemit world,
Musical Greetings from @muphy.