She is a guitar virtuoso, looks somewhat of a Norse Goddess and has played alongside some of rock and metal’s biggest names. She is NIta Stauss. If you haven’t heard of Nita Strauss or her music, what have you been doing? In any case we can’t get enough of her awesomeness, so we put together 5 of (the many more) things that truly make her a spectacular guitarist.
1. The Iron Maidens
She initially made her name known for her work with the all-female Iron Maiden tribute act The Iron Maidens. She credits that time as a big turning point in her career and has also listed Iron Maiden’s “Fear of the Dark” as “her record,” because of the huge impact the record made on her. She holds the Guitar tones on ‘Fear of the Dark’ dear because when you listen to the Maiden live album, you hear this incredible performance and hear the audience singing along to the guitar, which is something rare.
2. Touring with Alice Cooper
In 2014 Alice Cooper headed out on a lengthy North American tour, including shows with Mötley Crüe. In the summer of that year, Nita replaced Orianthi as Alice Cooper’s touring guitarist. She toured with him until July 2022, when she took a break to join Demi Lovato’s backing band, until she would return for the 2023 Alice Cooper tour.
3. Making her debut solo record by herself
In 2018 Nita launched a Kickstarter campaign for her debut solo record Controlled Chaos, which was set to feature all instrumental tracks. The response to the campaign was more than successful – she reached her initial goal in two hours and eventually raised eight times the amount. Strauss then proceeded to produce the record herself, including the majority of the engineering work and played all of the guitars and bass on the record.
Since then she has also had great success with her newer releases, some of which now include vocals like The Wolf you Feed, or Victorious ft. Dorothy.
4. Becoming the first female Ibanez signature artist
Before her only male guitar legends have had the honor of having their own signature model guitar produced by Ibanez. Strauss changed that by becoming the first-ever female Ibanez signature artist with her Ibanez JIVA10. Later also the American manufacturer DiMarzio released their Pandemonium humbuckers – signature pickups that were developed especially for her JIVA Ibanez guitar.
5. Playing for WWE
She initially started watching WWE because of her boyfriend, but then quickly became hooked. Strauss started performing live at WWE pay-per-view events in 2018, including wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura’s entrance music in front of a live audience of 78,000 fans and millions more who watched the worldwide streaming event. She went on to perform at several other events such as WWE Evolution and her original song Mariana Trench was the official theme for the professional wrestling event NXT TakeOver: WarGames.
Bonus:
Does the family name Strauss sound familiar…? Yes, we are talking exactly about that Strauss – Nita is actually a descendant of Austrian composer Johann Strauss through her father! Talk about having music in your blood.
You can also keep up with her and her awesome projects though Nita’s Instagram account where she posts regular updates.
There are also many other projects of Nita’s Neli feels inspired by, so let us know if you’d like to see a part 2!
Featured photo: AL CASE ASHLAND DAILY PHOTO