Gary James' Interview With
The Founder / Arranger / Leader Of
Femmes Of Rock
Starring Bella Electric Strings
Nina Di Gregorio



They are certainly one of the most unique musical groups of all of the Rock groups. They call themselves Femmes Of Rock Starring Bella Electric Strings. What they do is perform the music of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Van Halen, Queen, Jimi Hendrix, Metallica, The Who and so many more on electric violins. That's right, electric violins! They also performed with some of the biggest names in music, including Beyonce, Rod Stewart, Shakira, Ricky Martin, Deep Purple, Cheap Trick, Stevie Wonder and Michael McDonald. Nina Di Gregorio, founder and lead violinist for the Femmes Of Rock, spoke with us about her group.

Q - Nina, you really don't hear much about Rock music these days.

A - Yeah. I'm not into all the Pop-driven, electronic-driven music. I'm definitely old school when it comes to Rock and Classic Rock.

Q - I read one article where a music store owner said kids today are no longer picking up a guitar to learn how to play. Are there a lot of people then who are taking violin lessons?

A - I think that typically violin is something that you're either born into the lifestyle of it, because you have family members who are in the Classical music world, or it's something that you choose in school, typically when you're young because you have to play in the band or the orchestra and choose an instrument, which was the case for me when I started learning at nine years old. I think typically people kind of go through the Classical music way of training, whether that be reading music, whether that be Suzuki method, I think because of the school systems, the ones that still have music programs, I think that's probably the largest reason why people play the violin in the U.S these days. But, I think that this kind of new wave of electric violinists that can be found on social media that are kind of making it really cool and used beyond the way that you would typically just use in a school orchestra. I think you're seeing another generation of people who want to really learn this unique new instrument. And the more availability and the more viral videos that all of those electric violinist have, I think more children will want to learn how to play it.

Q - Was it always in the back of your mind that you make your living playing the violin, or that just didn't enter the picture?

A - No. The reason I make a living playing violin is purely by fate. I had no intention of making a career out of being a musician. I have a degree in music and I have a degree in English and I also studied Pre-Med Tracking in college. My goal was to possibly go to New York City and become a creative writer and maybe go to one of the universities there, like Columbia or to apply to medical school. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I read books about the brain my whole life, since I was a young kid. It fascinated me. So, I was either going to go into maybe the medical field or maybe some sort of writing based job. I thought about being a sportscaster for a while because I'm really into sports, namely the Buffalo Bills. That was a possibility. But, my goal in life never became music as a living until I was offered a job with Wayne Newton's orchestra when I was still in college, and I moved to Las Vegas thinking I only do it for a couple of years just to have this fun, thrilling job when I was a kid. Get it out of my system and go back to medical school or do something else. After I did that job I was offered a position as a soloist in Toni Braxton's band, and after that I started getting some dates performing with David Foster. One thing kind of led to another and before I knew it, many years had passed and I was just a professional musician. (laughs) So, it kind of happened, my fate, not my choice.

Q - Typically, when someone is a violinist, where do they go to seek work? Is it a symphony orchestra in a big city? Or a recording studio, if such a thing exists anymore? The big recording studios are closing down.

A - It all depends on the type of music you want to play and what you want to do with your career. There's a pretty strict divide between the Classical music world and the rest of the music world. So, if you're pursuing Classical music you need to start young and you need to probably be at three or four years old at a skill level and practicing like a full-time job all the way through your childhood. That's just how difficult and competitive Classical virtuoso, solo violin world is. Your job would then be you're either going to audition for an orchestra, which for major orchestras that pay decent money there are thousands of people from all over the world who are all virtuoso musicians and vying for the one seat that becomes available. So, if you're not able to get that chair, then you go to the small orchestras that pay a little less money. So, you're maybe going to do that if you're one of the really, really virtuoso players who's also lucky and has some connections. You can tour as the soloist with orchestras. If you're a regular person who's playing in a mid-level orchestra, you're usually supplementing your income with teaching. You have a full roster of students and you might do some gigs on the side, like weddings or restaurants. Things like that. Now, that wasn't the route I pursued in my career. Obviously if you've seen my video it's much different than that. I kind of wanted to carve my own path with a completely different thing. So, I started an electric Rock string quartet, which eventually one idea led to another, which led to the Femmes Of Rock show, which is the show that I produce and tour in now and I mostly only play electric violin. I play mostly in the style of Rock or Metal. I kind of created that job for myself because that's what I wanted to do. I moved to Las Vegas to play with Wayne Newton, but I also found there's a lot of corporate work in Las Vegas that you can make a living providing entertainment that's unique and interesting to companies who come here to host their sessions or whatever convention they have going on. You can make an absolute full-time living doing that, which I have. So, I was able to create my own career path based on what I was interested in, in a different kind of way than what a Classical musician would have done.

Q - Is it harder to play electric Rock violin as opposed to Classical violin?

A - So, that question depends on what you're playing and what you consider difficult. In terms of actual repertoire where we're talking about learning actual notes and playing the notes on the page, there's nothing I think in the Rock music repertoire that comes close to being as difficult as stuff in the difficult Classical music repertoire, if you're talking Paganini or Tchaikovsky concerts or things like that. There's nothing you're going to learn in Rock music note wise that's going to be more difficult than that. The thing that's difficult playing Rock violin is translating a solo or a style or a sound or a tome that was created for a totally different instrument to your instrument. A lot of people will cover guitar solos on a violin, but they'll sound like a violin. And that's not so hard to do really. But if you want to cover a guitar solo on a violin and you want to sound like the original guitar player, now you're getting into some other things. First of all, for a Classical musician who was trained Classical like myself, I transcribe the solo. And with some of those difficult solos like "Eruption", that could take quite some time to do, but the only way to make sure your notes and rhythm are completely accurate, if you're used to learning the way I learned. So, there's that. And then there's, okay, what kind of techniques is Eddie Van Halen using? He's using like a whammy kind of Floyd Rose to make some of those sounds. Now, how do I do that on the violin? I could just slide or I could actually use the same simulated effect and use a whammy to achieve those sounds. I could bend strings or I could fly to a note. So, I'm often times bending strings sideways the way a guitar player would, which a violinist never does. The strings are so much more tension on a violin than they are on a guitar. It often rips my fingers apart when I'm doing that too much. There's also other things like in the "Eruption" video I did the finger tapping, which took a really long time and it's still a work in progress to try and get the ideal technique and tone to work in a 'live' setting. You can control things in a studio setting, noise and EQs, easier than you can in a 'live' setting. It's still a work in progress to achieve correct and cleanest sound for that. But, just to be able to make sound doing finger tapping on a violin, there's no tutorial for that. You're not going to go on YouTube and find out how to do that on a violin. So, it was a lot of trial and error to achieve that. So, I would say in terms of notes, Classical repertoire is definitely harder in terms of techniques and sounding like something your instrument wasn't meant to do. The Rock genre is definitely more difficult for that.

Q - How do you determine which artist's songs you're going to perform?

A - So, that's kind of an easy question. I play the songs mostly that I like to play. If you look at some of the early arrangements, of early solos that I transcribed, they were by my favorite artists, like "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin. That was one of the first arrangements I wrote. I wrote a Who medley a long time ago, which consists of "Baba O'Riley" and "Who Are You", "Conformably Numb" by Pink Floyd, David Gilmour solos. I started out doing the songs I love. Now that we have a touring show, I've added in stuff that I was exposed to later in life or I think the audience would like that comes to see our show that maybe I didn't know too much about. I would have to say I have a gap in my musical knowledge, kind of throughout the '80s into the '90s to the point of the time where I would remember the music. So, I know the old stuff because probably my parents listened to it. Stuff from the '60s and '70s. And then I know the stuff that I was old enough to kind of remember the songs, like in the late '90s kind of stuff. But, that period in the '80s I have like a gap in that musical knowledge. But, we do an '80s Rock medley and even though I didn't grow up on a lot of those songs I've since transcribed some of the solos like "Panama".

Q - I take it that the people whose songs you're playing have heard about the Femmes Of Rock, but have any members of say Van Halen, Led Zeppelin or Queen or The Who come to one of your concerts?

A - I don't think anyone has ever come to one of my shows like that, but I have heard from some of the original band members on social media when I've done covers of their songs. When I covered "Eruption" and "Panama", Michael Anthony, the bass player from Van Halen commented about it. I heard from Alex Lifeson of Rush when I covered his solo in "Limelight". I heard from Richie Sambora when I covered his solo in "Livin' On A Prayer". Peter Frampton actually shared my video on his page when I covered "Do You Feel Like We Do". And there's been a few others as well that I've heard from via social media where they're kind of complimented me or shared the video.

Q - When you put this group together was it a hard sell? Did promoters and / or agents understand what Femmes Of Rock were all about about?

A - I think it was a very easy sell in the private, corporate market because at the time when I put the Bella Electric Strings together there was almost nobody doing this sort of thing where they were doing guitar effects on electric violin in a string quartet to backing tracks kind of setting. Now every single city has two or three electric string groups that are doing the same thing, but in the beginning it was just us pretty much. So, we had a corner on the market. So, it was a very easy sell in the corporate market. Now, in the public ticketed market it's a much more difficult sell because of the exact same reason, because it's so unique and so different that people don't know what to expect. In the beginning, if people saw pictures of us with electric violins they would immediately in their brain go to Beethoven. They think they're going to go watch a string quartet. So, it was a tough sell because people don't want to go to a Rock venue to watch a string quartet play. So, at that point we started adding into our branding, "Performing the music of Queen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd in a way you never heard before." And so, we tried to direct people towards the fact that it was a Rock show and not a Classical show. And even the name of the show, Femmes Of Rock is not a tribute show per se, even though we're doing covers in a unique way of specialized melodies. We can't just say, "Oh, we're a Pink Floyd tribute band," or "We're a Led Zeppelin tribute band." People go to that show they know exactly what they're buying a ticket to. So, the first time we go through a market, it's a little bit of a tough sell because people don't know what they're buy a ticket for. After we go through, people tell their friends. Their friends tell their friends. There's cities we've been going to, for instance Stadium Theatre in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and we pretty much sell the place out every year because they know us and know what to expect from us every year and they've told their friends about us. But, it's very difficult to explain to someone who has never seen our show what the Femmes Of Rock show is.

Q - And you're constantly updating the material you play onstage, correct?

A - Yes. We try to add a new medley every now and then to the show. I'm due to add another couple new ones. I'm about half way through an AC/DC medley for the show right now. But, it's good to update the show. For our show it's very expensive for me to add new things to the show. There's a lot of things that are involved in it. So, the first thing that happens is I have to write an arrangement for the band. If you're doing unique arrangements of songs you just can't tell everyone, "Go learn Panama by Van Halen and come back and play Panama," because we're doing it in a different way. Not only are we doing medleys of songs that are kind of stung together with a cohesiveness, with transitions between the songs, we also have four string players onstage who are playing with a three piece Rock backing band. And, we need to make sure that everybody's parts makes sense with each other and that they're not stepping on each other's toes. I want to make sure the cellist isn't playing exactly what the bass guitar is playing. That's going to sound weird if their rhythms are slightly off because the bass player is improvising a line. So, I want the cellist to play a harmony to the vocal line instead of doing that. So, the first step is making an arrangement that's cohesive, and I do that with music notation software. After that, I bring in my husband. He's really great at production elements. He'll create the backing track for the show. So, we have a click track. Then we have supplemental instruments which are the things we don't take on tour with us, like keyboards. Once you have that all filled in with the arrangement, you have video content that needs to synch with the musical click track. So, that costs money to have that made too. And then after you're done all that, sometimes the musicians that aren't onstage with us, that we can't afford to bring in, we want to have 'live' instruments on the track. We don't want to have computer generated instruments for that stuff. So, you record that wherever that may be. Now, when we play in Las Vegas, our hometown, it's great because I can bring a lot of those people with me to the stage. Like we had an eight piece string orchestra with us at the Smith Center. Acoustic strings that we normally can't afford to travel with. It doesn't make sense to do that. That's one of the perks of doing shows in our hometown of Las Vegas. There's a lot of things involved and a lot of costs involved if you want to add a new medley to our show at a high level. That's why we don't do it every show, but we try every time we come through the market again, to add at least one or two new things. Like I mentioned, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, we go to that theatre every year. We always try to do something new for them when we come back to that theatre.

Q - How many people does it take to get the Femmes Of Rock onstage?

A - We have a three piece band and a four piece electric string group that fronts the show. So, we are a seven piece band onstage and we travel with a technician, so there's eight of us in our crew when we travel. We probably have thirty-plus cast members that will come in and out of the show. It's more like a production show and less like a band. Somebody might get a tour and go on tour for a couple of months with whoever. One of our violinists plays with Shania Twain and Rod Stewart. Then one of our other cast members will come in and do our tour dates if that happens. Then when that one goes on tour and the other one is back, the other cast member can come back in. So, we have multiple cast members for the Femmes Of Rock show, but only seven onstage at one time.

Q - Do the members of Femmes Of Rock stick with the show for a long period of time?

A - Well, that's the beauty of having multiple cast members. Nobody really needs to quit the show ever. So, most of the people that play with us have been playing with us for at least ten years. If somebody gets a tour and they're going to be gone for six months, someone else steps in and fills in our dates then. But then when they come back from the tour they're free to be back in the mix of our shows again. So, there's no need to quit our show just because you've got another gig to go do. It's always kind of there.

Q - And how do the violinists get a gig with a "name" singer or musician? Is an agent involved or is it word of mouth?

A - How to play with a back-up string section, like somebody like that?

Q - Yes.

A - Well, we've done a lot of that. I've played with a lot of famous people. That's not what the Femmes Of Rock does. We are a headlining act, so we typically don't back up other people in an acoustic string section. The Bellla Of Strings, my roster of musicians, we do that sometimes. For instance, Deep Purple came to Las Vegas and they wanted a small, acoustic string section to back them up for this symphonic kind of show they were doing. And, a local agent in town asked me to put together a string section. So, I used all of my performers for that and we backed them up for the show. But, that's not what the Femmes Of Rock show typically does. But usually when you get those kinds of gigs they either come through the Musicians Union or a local agent or occasionally the artist's management will find you directly and like the branding and want that specific thing for their show.

Q - Rock groups will probably want your services for one night, wouldn't they? It's not a long, drawn out type of gig, is it?

A - Well, yes. A lot of times people come through for a one off, but sometimes there's a residency where The Strings play every night. Adele is like that. She'll come for, I don't know, a few weeks at a time and they'll play four or five shows a week and The Strings will be hired that entire time. Now, Celine Dion was here for a long time and those string players were employed for years in her show. My first job, the Wayne Newton show, we played a long time with him, and he's still doing shows.

Official Website: FemmesOfRock.com

© Gary James. All rights reserved.

The views and opinions expressed by individuals interviewed for this web site are the sole responsibility of the individual making the comment and / or appearing in interviews and do not necessarily represent the opinions of anyone associated with the website ClassicBands.com.