About Me
My name is Matthias, an amateur bass player based in Hamburg, in the North of Germany. I played the piano for 4 years during my childhood, but gave it up as I was too lazy to practise. Naturally, I regeret this decision, which my parents had prophecied. Nevertheless, music has always been one of my main interests and I have spent hours with earphones on my head ever since I was a child.In the late eighties, I became a big fan of UB40. After some time, I decided to find out more about the music they were (and still are!) playing: REGGAE!. I then became aware of other artists and bands such as Burning Spear, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ijahman Levi and Culture. However, the band that really hit me in those days was Black Uhuru. From then on, I listened exclusively to reggae music for about 5-6 years. Even though I started accepting other styles again, reggae in all its forms remains my favourite music style to date.After quitting piano playing, I got hold of a guitar we had in our house. Someone taught me 3 or 4 chords and I managed to teach myself some other simple stuff. I also played along to music I was listening to and eventually started picking along the bassline, which is often done in reggae. Showing this to a friend (and drummer!) named Carsten made him encourage me to try playing bass when his band split up and he was left alone with the keyboard player with whom he wanted to establish a new band. To make a long story short, I finally ended up with a Hughes & Kettner amp, an 18" SWR speaker and a Fender Precision bass. The band never came into existence because the keyboard player moved to another town. So Carsten and I started making our own music and calling ourselves "Musical Madness". We recorded some of our songs in 1999. One of them is "Don't Want Fe Wait", which you can listen to on my page. He also sang and I played keyboards.I then joined the well known Hamburg reggae band "One Drop Posse" in 1999 which was revived after a few years of absence. We played a few concerts until 2003 and also recorded some songs which were sadly never completed. The band was buried sometime in 2004.In 2001, a saxophone playing friend of mine took me along to a rehearsal of a ska band which was just being founded. After a long search for a drummer, the band was named "skapa flow". We started playing gigs in 2002 and recorded two CDs, "Rough Cut" (2002) and "Gentlemen Ska" (2004 / 05). A few tracks can be heard on my page. Unfortunately, the lead vocalist (who was also the main song writer) moved to another city and the drummer to Asia. Together with the trombone player, I tried to keep the band alive for a while but we finally gave up at the end of 2005, about 6 months after our last gig in Hamburg.In late 2005 / early 2006, my old drummer friend Carsten and I then put a band together to celebrate the fact that we now knew each other for 15 years. The intention was to play a number of favourite songs and a few of our own at a concert in Hamburg. This was the beginning of the band "Foundation Crew", in which we both play until today. You can check our profile on MySpace as well. It is a nine-piece band with a horn section and our own sound engineer. As we all have "normal" jobs, we only rehearse abot 3 times a month and perform a few times per year. We are currently working with a singer from Sierra Leone named Yardman.Regarding my equipment, I still use the amp and speaker mentioned above. I played the Fender P-Bass exclusively for about 8 years, until I bought my first 5-dtring bass, a Dean Edge Hammer 5. Currently, I mostly play an Ibanez ATK 305. I also own an Ibanez ATK 400, an Ibanez EWB20 acoustic bass and a Squire Affinity Tele.Anyway, thank you for reading this and for visiting my profile!
