OPETH guitarist Fredrik Åkesson is featured in a new interview with Ultimate-Guitar.com. An excerpt is available below:

UG: Your first recording with Opeth was the In Live Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. What was that like playing the entire Blackwater Park album and those songs from the other records?

Åkesson: "It’s pretty complex stuff but now I’ve been with the band four-and-a-half years, I feel it’s easier for me to understand Mikael’s ideas now than in the beginning. I feel more dialed in with the styles and playing the acoustic things. Of course I had to put a lot of time to learn all the stuff. I’m very picky and I want to nail everything as it is. And then if I feel, 'Well, maybe this part, the second part of this solo, I could just go a bit on my own here and do something.' I’ll leave open for some room for some spontaneous kind of improvised stuff as well."

UG: Blackwater Park was your favorite Opeth record?

Åkesson: "Yeah, absolutely. Still Life is one of my favorites too of the older stuff. A lot of those songs before the anniversary show, a lot of those songs from Blackwater Park, I already knew before that because we’d been playing ‘em. Then again we played a couple songs from the first two records and that was really fun to do new versions with old songs with the new lineup with Ax [Martin Axenrot] on drums. I really enjoyed playing those songs."

UG: So you’d actually sit there with Mikael and have him show you the riffs and the changes?

Åkesson: "Exactly. Because some of that stuff is kind of hard to listen to and beginning when I joined the band I wanted to learn on my own. Then when I meet Mikael, it’s like, 'It’s not that chord, it’s that one' ‘cause there’s so much stuff going on with the twin guitars and one guitar is playing that and one is playing that. A lot of times instead of me sitting and trying to learn on my own, just meeting Mikael saves me a lot of time."

UG: You obviously knew about Opeth before joining them. What did you know about their reputation as a band?

Åkesson: "I was a fan of the band actually. Opeth had a really good reputation as a band and also the reputation was that the band is really original sounding. We discussed that there was a lot of—I wouldn’t say—surprises in music but you never really know what’s gonna happen in Opeth; it’s not predictable."

As previously reported, Opeth will be heading to Japan in February 2012. They'll be playing on the 16th at Akaso in Osaka, 17th at Club Quattro in Nagoya and 18th at Studio Coast in Tokyo.

Upcoming Opeth tour dates can be found this location.

Opeth vocalist/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt, breaks down the band's new album, Heritage, in the videos below. Check out BraveWords.com review of Heritage here.