“The first time I did a guitar clinic was something of an accident. It was some sort of band promotion in Taiwan in January 2004 and I was asked to do it. I agreed, but at the time I was quite nervous and scared about it all,” says DragonForce guitarist Herman Li, who is all set to embark on a guitar clinic tour to India (from June 3 to 5 in Mumbai and New Delhi) and China. Meanwhile, the London sextet’s drummer Dave Mackintosh will be joining Herman for his drum clinics in China and his own sessions in Indonesia.
“And now,” Herman continues, “I realise that it’s something I can do and enjoy doing. You learn new things when you teach. It also gives me a chance to interact with fans on a level that would be impossible at a live show.”
Renowned for its blistering and at times, impossibly fast, multi-layered and multi-textured guitar parts, the “extreme power metal band” (as Dave likes to refer to DragonForce) that Herman and fellow guitarist Sam Totman formed in 1999 was actually in talks with various parties about a maiden voyage to India a year-and-a half ago. “But that didn’t work out. Given that we haven’t been touring much of late, it’s hard to say when we’ll be able to play a full show in India,” says the guitarist.
Herman adds, “Apart from obviously answering questions posed by members of the audience, I’ll be playing stuff that they ask me to play. It will be an opportunity for people to get a close-up view of how I play... something one wouldn’t be able to clearly see at a live show.”
Two fairly curious facts about the Hong Kong-born guitarist are that he’s completely self-taught (an unfathomable fact, when you consider the epic nature of his shredding and riffing) and that he’s left-handed, but learnt to play right-handed. You would however be excused for mistaking Herman for a child prodigy, but what is possibly one of the strangest tales about the axeman is that he first picked up a guitar at the age of 16.
“I was a fan of rock and metal music and loved bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Iron Maiden, Bon Jovi and Europe,” he reminisces. And as is very often the case with people who discover and fall in love with this sort of music, Herman too yearned to start playing the guitar. “A friend of mine went out and got me a guitar — a Squier, which I played for a while before shifting to Ibanez guitars,” says the former video game aficionado, who admits that he stopped playing games for around 10 years straight after first picking up the guitar.
Over the years, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and John Petrucci (whose fret board finesse greatly influenced Herman’s own style) became his biggest inspirations.
One of the biggest criticisms levelled against the band since its inception came from people who believe that it is most important to keep things simple. They opine that DragonForce indulge in what can most uncharitably be referred to as “musical masturbation”.
Dave, who counts Neil Peart, Mike Portnoy and Clive Burr among his drum heroes, steps in and says, “While DragonForce are complicated and fast, we always have one eye on a simple melody. We believe that you can have an extremely complicated song as long as people can whistle along or sing along with it. It will be catchy.”
Speaking of catchy sounds, it is believed that Herman’s love for video gaming (and more pertinently, the MIDI theme tunes and sound effects in these games) found its way into his guitar playing.
This is most evident in the band’s track Through the Fire and Flames (from the 2006 album Inhuman Rampage), where Herman replicates the sound effects from the game Pac-Man on his guitar at the start of his solo.
Consequently, a number of music publications and “experts” began to refer to the band’s music — among a number of other tags — as “Nintendo Metal”. At the very mention of this phrase, the weariness in Herman’s voice is more than palpable. “That ‘Nintendo Metal’ thing is so overused. A tiny percentage of all the songs we play have some sort of video game sounds. People grabbed that little part and turned it into a name to pigeonhole us,” he sighs.
In order to maintain the sort of scorching speed and surgical accuracy required to perform DragonForce’s music, it stands to reason that Herman must possess some sort of back-breaking (not to mention, finger-ripping) daily practice regime.
Setting the record straight, he says, “I don’t practice on a daily basis. From a few weeks before a tour or a new recording, I practice for six hours a day.”
Of course, what you practice (or study) is far more important than how many hours you spend over it. So what does Herman’s practice routine entail? “First of all, I work on tightly and accurately playing through our songs. Then I practice guitar techniques and work on new ones. Ultimately, if you want to make your live show exciting, you need to work on a variety of techniques that will help you develop showmanship,” says the man whose first piece of advice to people picking up the guitar for the first time is often that they should learn to play while standing up. Plenty more non-traditional bits of advice are expected from Herman at his guitar clinics in India.
Great, but why should people actually turn up for the said clinics? “If you like the electric guitar and want to see it from a whole new angle, if you are a fan of guitar music in general and want to hear guitar music that you won’t get to hear in the mainstream, you’ll probably enjoy it yourself and learn a couple of things too,” he smiles as our brief interaction draws to a close.
Catch Herman Li’s Guitar Clinics at St. Andrew’s Auditorium (Mumbai) on June 3, P.A.L.M Expo at Goregaon (Mumbai) on June 4 and at Café Morrison (New Delhi) on June 5.