12 at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. With Midori Gotō, she played in Antonín Dvořák's String Quartet No. Guo played with the Foo Fighters at the 2008 Grammy Awards, and with Off the Deep End she played at the wrap party for the Sundance Film Festival. In 2007, she toured Australia with Metaphor, an all-girl crossover band. Her parents were very angry and did not agree with her decision.
Guo left USC in her junior year, as she found it increasingly difficult to balance performing and attending classes. It took her three years and many YouTube videos before she was satisfied with her attempts.
Guo began experimenting with pedals and different techniques, trying to discover how to play the cello to sound like a guitar. She went to one of their shows at The Whiskey in Hollywood, and it influenced her to try to adapt the cello to the heavy metal style. During her freshman year, Guo dated a guitarist with an 80s style classic metal band. She studied under Nathaniel Rosen and also Eleonore Schoenfeld, one of the most influential cellists of the 20th century, who had taught both Rosen and Guo's father.
Tina joined the Civic Youth Orchestra when she was 10.Īfter graduating from Poway High School, she attended the USC Thornton School of Music to study the cello on a full scholarship. Her parents forced her to practice 6–8 hours a day. At age 7, she began also studying the cello with her father. At age five, she moved to the United States with her family, she began violin lessons with her mother. Tina began playing piano at the age of 3 in China. Tina Guo was born in Shanghai, China to father Lu-Yan Guo, a concert cellist, and mother Fei-Fei Soong, a concert violinist, who are the current artistic directors of the California International Music and Art Festival, an annual event held in San Diego, California.
She also performed with Swedish power metal band Sabaton on their headlining of the festival and recorded with them in 2021 the song “Steel Commanders”. On August 1, 2019, she joined the German symphonic metal band Beyond the Black at Wacken Open Air Festival. In February 2019, she toured with the Victoria Symphony. In June 2015, she performed as a guest soloist at the 2015 Kraków Film Festival in Poland. She toured as a featured guest with Al Di Meola, Yoshiki of X Japan, and recently appeared with the Tenerife Symphony and Choir in the Canary Islands performing "Batman: The Dark Knight" Suite at the Tenerife International Film Festival, featured on Electric Cello. She also performed with violinist Midori Goto in Dvorak's American String Quartet at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and completed four national tours of Mexico and Italy performing the Shostakovich, Dvorak, Haydn, and Saint-Saëns Cello Concertos. She has appeared as a soloist with the San Diego Symphony the National Symphony Orchestra (Mexico), the Thessaloniki State Symphony in Greece, the Petrobras Symphony in Brazil, and the Vancouver Island Symphony in British Columbia. Her international career as a cellist, electric cellist, erhuist, and composer is characterized by videos featuring theatrical backdrops and elaborate costumes, a range of genres, and an improvisatory style in film, television, and video game scores.
Tina Guo ( Chinese: 郭婷娜 pinyin: Guō Tíngnà) (born 28 October 1985) is a Chinese-born American cellist and erhuist from San Diego.