Matthew grew up in Adelaide, Australia. He started off playing bass guitar before taking up drumming at age 13. It wasn’t long before he was playing drums with a friend in a punk rock band, and he continued to appear on the local scene with them throughout his time in high school.

In 2013 he decided to move to Melbourne, the hometown of drumming legend Virgil Donati. He studied music performance at Melbourne Polytechnic, where he completed the Bachelor of Music course. While there, he took lessons from world-class percussionists, including David Jones, who became a mentor and an inspiration to him. They worked together on a number of recordings, masterclasses and performances, including for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Soon, Matthew was teaching individual and group lessons himself.

Matthew is open to all styles of music. Although he mainly learned from jazz percussionists, his greatest passion is still for punk, rock and thrash. He had the opportunity to gain international experience touring Southeast Asia with the underground thrash band Desecrator.

While he was studying psychology in Adelaide, Matthew got in touch with Mirko. He had a keen interest in joining our team at thePlanetDrum and introducing us to his innovative ideas for incorporating technology into our teaching. Having already spent time living in Berlin to learn German in 2018, he took the opportunity to move there in April 2019 after finishing his studies. He’s been part of our teaching staff at thePlanetDrum ever since.

Teaching languages: German and English