Ultimate Guitar recently caught up with DragonForce axe-master Herman Li for an excluisve interview. An excerpt is available below.

UG: Do you have any guilty pleasure artists or songs that you listen to?

Herman: "To be honest, I don't have any guilty pleasures because I am not embarrassed by anything I listen to. If you think about it, the stuff I was listening to everyone thought it was stupid anyway. When I was getting into playing the guitar, people would say, 'Well you don't want to play solos. It's dumb. It is way not cool' and all that kind of stuff. So I've been since the beginning when I was learning to play the guitar, people have just been making fun of me anyway. So you bring the YouTube era and the Internet era, they've got nothing compared to when they were telling me the stuff face-to-face."

UG: Do you remember your first guitar?

Herman: "Yes. The first guitar I got my parents paid for it and it was a Squier made in Korea. Red. It was even worse than what you get now. Back then, I think the cheap guitars were worse than now. A couple years ago, I picked up one of the cheapest Ibanez guitars and I thought, 'What the hell?'"

UG: Why did you say that?

Herman: "I thought, 'If I had this cheap guitar at the beginning of my playing, I would have probably got much better.' The neck was so much better than the piece of junk I had before. Pickups that fed back if you were even near the amp and those guitars I was using were completely useless actually. I got rid of it after a year."

Read the complete interview here.

In the video below, shot late last year, Dragonforce singer Marc Hudson talks to Banger TV's Daniel DK about how how he went from pub guitarist to rock star, the band's songwriting process, and why he likes to be a gentleman on stage.