From The Lion King to Foo Fighters: Tina Guo proves a cello is all she needs to be a rock star
She may not master the guitar or even sing, but Guo’s classical music skills have earned her places next to famous rock and heavy metal bands, and made her a social media star
With her hair flips, high heel-kicks, killer string moves and an Instagram following of more than 118,000, American-Chinese musician Tina Guo is making her way to Asia to perform with renowned German-born composer Hans Zimmer on his concert tour. They will perform in Hong Kong later this month.
Grammy Award-nominated and Brit Award Female Artist of the Year-nominated musician Guo is a classically trained cellist, electric cellist and erhuist.
Despite being a successful musician in her own right (she was taught by some of the most influential cellists of the 20th century, Nathaniel Rosen and Eleonore Schoenfeld, and played with Foo Fighters at the 2008 Grammy Awards), it was social media that launched Guo’s career into the stratosphere.
“I feel lucky that I accidentally started doing social media very early on without knowing what I was doing”, says Guo. She loves taking photos and videos of herself performing, she says, first using little digital cameras from “drugstores on timer modes”, and she did this long “before iPhones were invented and the obsessive journaling or documenting of everyday activities” that are so prevalent these days.
“I truly believe that my entire career has been built online”, says Guo. “As an example, Hans [Zimmer] first contacted me to work with him after he saw my Queen Bee music video that I released in 2009. It was my very first music video, playing heavy metal on the electric cello, and that video led to so many doors opening for me, especially in the soundtrack world when many composers and producers watched it.”
Queen Bee won Best Short Film/Music Video at the Downtown Los Angeles Film Festival.
But her road to success wasn’t easy. Known to practise up to eight hours a day since the age of seven when she first picked up the cello because of her strict musician parents, today Guo says she is grateful for the discipline they instilled in her. “[My parents] still teach seven days a week from their home studio, and my father, especially, is possibly even more of a workaholic than I am”, she professes.