Interview With HERMAN LI: “I’m working on instructional guitar lessons, but not the same that you’ve seen out there”

Interview By Alison Booth

Extreme power metal giants DRAGONFORCE unleashed their seventh studio album “Reaching Into Infinity” back in May and have been packing out venues around the world for their live shows. The band are now well into the European leg of their “Reaching Into Infinity” world tour, but prior to that, in Sheffield, England, Metal Shock Finland Senior Manager Alison Booth met up with guitar maestro Herman Li in Sheffield for her Blackdiamond’s Metal Mayhem radio show on TotalRock. (The show can be heard here.)

You can read some excerpts from the chat below and listen in full on the audio player:

Discussing dragons and if he’s a Game Of Thrones fan, Herman was quite expressive about social media, stating:

“Yeah I watch it. I’m not as crazy as people who go to Eastern Europe and visit the sights! I’m not in a rush to see it, like ‘Oh my God I gotta see it!’ And because I’m not in a rush it’s actually pretty horrible – people on social media posting what’s happening. Luckily I don’t follow anyone on Facebook, if you’re my friend I won’t follow you anyway. Every time I friend someone, I click ‘unfollow’ because I don’t care. They want to ruin the sports events for me, I get the results straight away.

Sometimes you’re on tour and you can’t see it immediately and it’s ‘oh thanks!’ Now it seems people want to ruin movies and TV shows and stuff, but I pretend I’m still their friend. But I technically unfriended them in an ‘unfollow’ way!” (laughs)

DRAGONFORCE
Sheffield, October 2017

Discussing the near future, Herman revealed:

“I’m actually working on an instructional guitar thing, a lesson thing. It’s not gonna be the same that you’ve seen out there. The reason I’m doing it is that everyone has approached a bunch of subjects except these ones, that I think are important.

All this is coming from playing around the world for years and playing guitar for years. It’s not just about techniques and playing fast and playing notes – it’s more like the theory involved to be a good guitar player. You know, you can teach people notes, but to create them, you have to show them the path and inspire them, than just saying ‘I can play this really fast here and just copy it’. I’ve been writing about it for a few years anyway, so it’s something I’ve been working on. Finally I’ve the time to make it happen.”