Seth Hedquist graduated from The School for Music Vocations at Southwestern Community College in 2005. He works as a full-time professional musician in Des Moines, Iowa. As an educator, Hedquist teaches improvisation - primarily with a guitar focus - to students of all ages at The Seth Hedquist School of Music and Improvisation (SHSMI), and is the jazz guitar instructor at Drake University. As a performer, Hedquist has played and recorded with Des Moines artists such as Bonne Finken, Nella Thomas, James Biehn, and The Maytags. He has played with the Des Moines Symphony since 2015; pieces include George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (tenor banjo) and William Bolcom’s Ragomania (guitar). With the Symphony he has also accompanied Tony Award-winning performers such as Audra McDonald, Sutton Foster, Kristin Chenoweth, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Bernadette Peters and Santino Fontana. He plays at the Des Moines Civic Center for traveling Broadway musicals; past shows include Beautiful: A Carole King Musical, Something Rotten!, Chicago, Mean Girls, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, The Wiz, MJ: The Musical, and Back to the Future. And he has played for the Des Moines Metro Opera’s Porgy and Bess (2022), The Falling and the Rising (2023), and The Barber of Seville,  (2024), the last of which he also made his debut stage role as “The Guitarist.”

Hedquist is the bandleader for Plymouth Congregational Church’s Saturday Night Band, and is the music director and choral conductor at Wakonda Christian Church.

He lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children.