In addition to singing in the choir, he received a thorough musical training with Rogier Michael, the Kapellmeister, who recognized his extraordinary talent.

While Schütz made more than one trip to Italy, Schein apparently spent his entire life in Germany, making his grasp of the Italianate style all the more remarkable.

His early concertato music seems to have been modeled on Lodovico Grossi da Viadana's Cento concerti ecclesiastici, which were available in an edition prepared in Germany.

While some of his sacred music uses the most sophisticated techniques of the Italian madrigal for a devotional purpose, such as the motet Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen setting verses from Psalm 84, several of his secular collections include such things as drinking songs of a surprising simplicity and humor.

Some of his works attain an expressive intensity matched in Germany only by those of Schütz, for example the spectacular Fontana d'Israel or Israel's Brünnlein (1623), in which Schein declared his intent to exhaust the possibilities of German word-painting "in the style of the Italian madrigal."