It’s no coincidence that DragonForce’s signature sound sometimes reminds one of the frenetic echoes of an old school video game.

                Considering that it’s nearly impossible to do something so unique in today’s metal scene, there’s no denying that DragonForce’s electronic-laden solos are one of a kind. Guitarist Herman Li visited with TCS July 15, 2008, while in Fresno, California for a show.

Hi, Herman here.

Hey Herman, what’s going on today?

Pretty good. Just working out in the morning.

What’s involved in that?

Just some judo, some jujitsu, some striking, some kung fu. Just playing around.

Nice. You guys in Fresno today?

Yeah, yeah. For another show.

I’m up in the great state of Montana.

Oh, ok. Nice.

You guys are knee deep in the Mayhem festival now and with Ozzfest sort of fading away this summer, it’s become the premiere metal gathering in the states. How stoked are you to be on the bill?

I think this festival’s been really cool. It’s really been packed out and I think the shows have been really great. Every band has been really good. It’s like a summer festival for this kind of metal music.

You guys had a cancellation and remake just recently as far as the Sacramento gig went.

Yeah, that was moved to yesterday, but that went good. It didn’t make that much difference. It was really hot, though. I guess some people couldn’t make it because it was a Monday, but it was still a great show. No kind of crazy, amazing stories yet. Not really. I’ve only done about a week or something.

How is it for you guys to get out there and capture fans who might be there to see Slipknot or Disturbed or one of the other bands?

We do our own thing whatever happens. We do our own shows and obviously we have our own fans, but there’s a lot of people there that have never heard of us, or they have heard of us but have never seen us live. Maybe they heard it from radio or a video game. It’s really been good. I don’t know. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it except that it’s really hot. When we play, it’s usually about 7:30, so it’s really cool so the sun’s going down and we have the lights. Everything’s cool.

You guys play at such a frantic pace. How do you guys keep yourselves energized to do this night in and night out? You mentioned working out before a gig.

The work out thing has really nothing to do with it, but the kind of music we play. You listen to it and you can’t really expect the band to be standing still and just be carrying a guitar. We do a lot of melodic and intense music and when we play that stuff, we tend to jump around and spin in the air and all kinds of things. It’s just the way that we are. You can’t play energetic music looking bored (laughs).

The new album has eight tracks on it and six of the songs are longer than eight minutes. What’s the determining factor when you write songs that makes them go seven or eight instead of the traditional three or four minutes?

I think traditional three and four, it doesn’t even give us half the amount (laughs) it doesn’t give us enough time to put the music across. There’s so much stuff we wanna do in each song. That’s our trademark sound. All the solos or the lead guitars or the singing, we don’t try to go for radio music. We don’t try to go for three, four minute music. No compromise from what we wanted to do. All our albums always had long songs. We never really done under five minute songs ever.

I love the wicked solos towards the end of ‘Heroes of Our Time.’ How excited are you to see that metal has worked its way back to the great solos of the past? It seems like it disappeared for awhile but bands like yourselves are bringing it back to the fans.

Yeah. I think that’s definitely correct. I think it’s not the way it’s coming back but it’s that more styles of music around now these days. It’s not like one style domination and that’s all you get to hear. It doesn’t matter what kind of music it is, it’s important to have a diverse style in the scene. If people make their own decisions of what they like, solos or not, melodic or not, it’s just there should be enough styles for you to choose from.

You guys tend to incorporate some unorthodox styles of keyboards into the music. Take me back a bit and tell me how you started to meld that sound into the overall vibe of this band.

I think our keyboard player, is getting better and better just like everyone in the band’s getting better and we’re discovering and trying to add more influences into the music. I think keyboard is definitely one of the things that’s left unmentioned in our music. It’s definitely really up there against other bands, our keyboard player, for all the stuff he comes up with. From melodies to sounds to the production of it. It just adds an extra dimension that gives us the Dragonforce sound. It’s not just by the guitars. It’s really everything.

Sometimes you hear this analogy a lot, but it sometimes sounds like a late’80s video game gone wild.

We listen to a lot of video game music back then, Sam and I, so it’s just part of the music that we play. We tend to be like, ‘this is a really cool sound, let’s try to do something like that,’ and he kind of got into that as well. A lot of the sounds of video games, the video game sounds, we actually do on guitar. It’s not really the keyboard. The keyboard more provides different styles of things, the atmosphere and different kinds of effects with this chaos pattern. It’s not just the keyboard, it’s playing three instruments actually.

Tell me about the cover art for ‘Ultra Beatdown,’ which was recently revealed.

That’s done by Andrew Jones, or they call him Android Jones. He does a lot of the video game artwork for Nintendo and ‘Metroid 3,’ and those kinds of games, so we wanted more of a futuristic theme on this cover. The last few albums, we’ve gone for the computer, kind of modern generated kind of graphics. This is only the first album that we didn’t do that.

Frederique has been in the band for two years and is about to appear on his first studio record with you guys. How are you settling in with the new bassist?

It’s cool. It’s worked out well because Freddy isn’t just a bass player. He can play the guitar. He understands keyboard. We try to get the best part of each different musician. Bassist, you only have to do one track of recording, so we also keep our eyes and ears on guitarist as well. It’s always good to share ideas and that’s how we made this album.

‘Through the Fire and Flames’ is known as one of the most difficult songs to play on ‘Guitar Hero.’ Considering all of the incredible songs on that game franchise, how killer is it for your work to be thought of in such a way?

(laughs). I think it’s great. It is a really long song and has lots of guitar solos as far as being fast paced. As far as I know, they didn’t make this song hard on purpose on the game. After they made the game, how do you call it? Those things that you press the buttons, I don’t know what the word for it, it just ended up being the hardest one to play. That’s basically it. It wasn’t on  purpose to make the Dragonforce song hardest to play, the just make it the amount of notes on the song and how it works out. It’s cool. It’s the most play song on the game, ‘Guitar Hero 3.’

Have you guys actually played it?

Yeah, I played it even before it came out (laughs). I had to visit the game studio while they were still making the game. I was impressed when I first saw it. It was cool. We all got a copy of the game.

I’ve heard stories of guitarists getting sucked into ‘Guitar Hero’ and playing it and then they go back to play their guitar and it freaks them out because their confused looking for the big colored buttons. Do you guys have any problems like that? (laughs).

(laughs). When I play that game, I don’t even think about the guitar. I just think about video games. This is a controller. This is not a guitar (laughs). Then I can play. If I think of it as a guitar, then I’m completely gone. Maybe I should play it left handed, so that I don’t think of it as a guitar at all.

Or try playing it with your nose.

Or play it with my leg or my feet. Just don’t think guitar. It just confuses me completely.

Having not heard the entire new album, tell me about its construction in terms of what types of liberties you guys took in trying different things?

For this album, I guess the part we spent the most time on is the singing more than anything else. We worked really really hard on the vocals, harmonies, all those things. You can really hear it and people that heard the album always told me ‘wow, what happened to the vocals? Did you guys spend lots of work on that?’ That’s the one that we really went for. Of course, we spent lots of time on the other stuff too, but people can really hear it. There’s lots of dynamics happening. The songs are not just fast, fast, fast, this time. There’s definitely lots of changes happening. We even have a mid-tempo song. We kind of changed the game around.

This year, it seems like there’s been so much doom and gloom and stories about the record labels going down and nobody’s making money and all that. How has all of that affected Dragonforce, or has it?

We’re doing good, but we haven’t worked for two years (laughs). We never came from that era. We’re not like an old band that was around in the mid-‘90s or ‘80s, so we don’t know what it was like before that. I think it hides and excuse when you make a crap album (laughs). Our last album came out six months after release in America and we still sold over 350,000 albums after awhile and we got a gold single from it. I think you have to make a good album and that’s what counts anyway. You can knock the image, all that bullshit image and how you dress, but in the end, it all comes down to the music. The scene of the image always fades away anyways. The great bands, the great songs, they never die.

If you could share the stage with any bands that have ever played past or present, which ones would you choose?

To be honest, we’d rather be headlining and doing our own thing (laughs). That’s been it. Playing with a band, that’s kind of gone past us. We’d just like to hang on … we like to tour with people that are cool that we like to have a good time with. We don’t really care, like ‘I wanna tour with that band.’ Mainly we just do our show and have fun.

Alright Herman, I appreciate the conversation and I’m really looking forward to hearing the new record.

Cool. Thanks.

Hopefully see you in Montana someday.

Yeah, thanks man. Take care.

Bye.

Bye.