Matthews Biography

Full Name is Matthew Ryan Scheideman born on September 26 1988 in Edmonton Alberta. I grew up on a farm near Onoway Alberta.

My first introduction to music was at age 10 when my brother sam started playing guitar and was shortly after urged by our parents to learn an instrument. Neither on of our parents had played any instruments but thought that we should be exposed to learning music. When they asked me to pic an instrument my first question was “does it matter what I pick” and they said “no, pick anything” so my first choice was drums. However that was put down before the "d" had left my lips so they suggested I learn harmonica. Much to my distase I tried it and am very pleased that I did. We had played many kinds of music growing up including gospel, hymns, country and rock . Through this period we realized that bassists were hard to come by so I bought a Squire PB which was destroyed not long after.

Me and Sam had started building guitars from raw lumber when we were about 14 and I had the bad habit of making signifigant alterations to store boughten guitars as well. This is what lead the Squier PB guitar to its death as it was the victom of one of my bright ideas to glue it and another guitar together to make a double neck so that I could play guitar or bass without switching instruments. However it was ugly, heavy and sounded horrible so it along with many other instruments that I had made were burned in the fire place in our house as I couldn’t stand looking at things I made that I didn’t like anymore. Although some of the first were failures every guitar I made was a little nicer and played a little better which leaves me with the beast I play now.

My current bass guitar tenderly known as my "Bad Ass Mother F$@%er" or "B.A.M.F."  was built in shop in high school which was much better equipt with tools than the farm I grew up on. The back is made of White Poplar, top is Douglas Fir and the neck and fret board is a realy nice piece of something I pulled out of a pallet.  The tuning machines are actuly ment for a guitar however I always found bass heads to be rather prehistoric in nature and decided to use these instead and they work great. The pick up is a big humbucker wired passive strait to the Jack…. WHAT!?!?! Passive pickup and no knobs?  Yes  you did read that right! Simple cheap things that work are what I like, pots get noisey and batterys run out so I wired pickup strait to jack and called it good enough. Ive been playing this thing exclusively for four years and have had zero and I mean zero problems.

Gear:

The Bass I Made

1971 Hot-rodded Fender Bassman

…Sams tuner from time to time TeHe