After graduating from Ruston High School, where he was Junior and Senior class president, and spending two years at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, Schneider moved to Denver, Colorado to attend university.

Although he subsequently left school to pursue his musical ambitions, his academic interests remained strong as an avid student of analytic number theory.

Schneider also collaborated with Andy Partridge of XTC in the early 2000s, with the pair reportedly writing over thirty songs together by telephone; the project, however, produced no recorded results.

Schneider also composed a number of jingles for television commercials during the 2000s, including a string of pop songs for the Kohl's department store chain.

Schneider formed a comparatively dark band in 2004 called Ulysses in Lexington, Kentucky, which released the 2005 album 010 on Eenie Meenie Records recorded live with a single microphone, and released a second Marbles album Expo in 2005 influenced by Electric Light Orchestra, as well as Gary Numan, Michael Jackson, New Order and the Cars.

During 2006, it was announced that Schneider was playing in a Kentucky-based psychedelic garage band with his brother-in-law, Craig Morris, called Thee American Revolution.

[7][8][9] He has also incorporated prime numbers and the sieve of Eratosthenes in both a composition to be performed by a bell tower, and in the score for a play by mathematician Andrew Granville and playwright Jennifer Granville that debuted at the Institute for Advanced Study on December 12, 2009, and he has written a plan for an electronic composition based on prime numbers lasting millions of years.

[10] The mind-controlled synthesizer uses a voltage generator made from a circuit-bent Mattel MindFlex electronic toy, scored for one "conductor" wearing an EEG sensor.

Pieces performed with mind control include Schneider's "Composition for Two Hemispheres"[11] and a score by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel.