In a new excerpt from his interview with Ultimate Guitar's Justin Beckner, DragonForce guitarist Herman Li discusses his gear, new music, recording solos, the ongoing lockdown, training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and more.

UG: Are you working on anything new?

Li: "Well, it's not really old news because it only came out in September so it's not that long. But we were originally not planning to work on any new songs. I was supposed to still be on tour right now. But we actually started writing new songs already. You have to take that time away to write new songs. Now that we've been sort of forced away, we've started to write new songs together. So we're already working on songs for a new album which isn't going to be out for ages."

UG: The virus has really shaken up the music industry but I'm glad you're making the best use of your downtime.

Li: "I'll be honest with you, the virus has not been a good thing, but I'm happy this has happened in a really strange way. Don't take it the wrong way, but it's like, given me a moment of breathing space to be at home. I have so many things to do and I couldn't do it - I had no time to do it between touring. Now the world seems to have slowed down for a moment and it has given me time to catch up on stuff. I don't know if people can relate to it but I am living in Los Angeles right now, as opposed to living in Europe. Everything is a bit slower in Europe, you have more time to relax and vacation and it feels like you have more downtime to yourself. Being in the US, you don't really get that. It's kind of slowed down altogether and people are coming together - it reminds me of living back in Europe."

UG: I read an interview you did a while back where you said that Extreme Power Metal was the first album in a long time where you didn't have people telling you what to do and it was just you and Sam (Totman /  guitars) writing. Who was telling you what to do and what were they saying?

Li: "Well, the story of this is that the first three of four DragonForce albums, we pretty much did exactly what we wanted. There was no one trying to give us an ear and tell us they know better. When you get successful, people always think they know better and they want to tell you (how to do things) so they can get a percentage or something. Suddenly everyone is blowing smoke up your ass. When you become successful, you suddenly have way more friends and they all want something.

I would say that on Extreme Power Metal, we didn't listen to anybody. We did it like we did when the band started. We changed the whole structure. We got rid of management, we got rid of all this stuff, and restructured the whole band. We did this prior to recording the album. We knew the only way for the band to move forward was to restructure the way the band is supposed to be run. So that was it, we just went out and did it ourselves. We did the stage production, which is crazy. Our live production has never been this big, even back when Inhuman Rampage came out, and that album was massive, the production for that wasn't even close to what we have on stage now, and we did this production ourselves. Sam made those massive arcade machines - he cut the wood and painted them. This is DragonForce, it's not DragonForce paying someone to create something for us, we created it ourselves."

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