In the British power metal heroes DragonForce, guitarist Herman Li doesn’t just shred a mile a zeptosecond; he seemingly does it all.
He mixes. He edits the music videos. He programs the video screens. It's a work ethic and attention to detail matched by every member of the band who all play a role that transcends their instrument. DragonForce's other founding guitarist, Sam Totman, builds their fantastical stage props. (No joke: he cuts the wood and everything.)
“I’m there dealing with stuff until the end, really,” Li, who originally hails from Hong Kong, tells GRAMMY.com from the band's tour bus. They had just rocked Madrid, and he’s in his personal office in the bus’s upstairs lounge, juggling a myriad of tasks.
“I’ve got three, four computers laid out here — my special little table,” Li says. “And I go, ‘What happened during today’s show that we can fix, make better?
Li’s talking about manifold logistics: the programming of the lights, confetti, pyrotechnics, and other elements. But it's a method he applies to his entire career, where he’s never succumbed to complacency, despite his prodigious ability.
That approach is on full display on Warp Speed Warriors, DragonForce’s ninth album and first since 2019, released on March 15. By the sound of tunes like “Power of the Triforce,” “Doomsday Party,” and their cover of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams,” their eccentricity and passion remain undimmed.
2024 marks the GRAMMY nominees’ 25th year in this very specific lane. Beating the odds, they rode their synthesis of power metal, fantasy themes, and video game soundtracks to the top — but Li insists he’s got lightyears to go.
“We're students of the art forever,” the virtuoso says. “If I think I'm a great guitar player, better than anyone else, that means I really need to learn.”
This interview has been edited for clarity.
You just got off stage in Madrid. How was the vibe up there?
Spain is always really awesome. And even though we drove, like, 21 hours on the tour bus, you know, from the last show which was in Germany, to here — it was worth every second. People are very passionate about music here.
We're doing songs on the new album, like, “Power of the Triforce,” “Doomsday Party.” We even did the Taylor Swift cover, “Wildest Dreams” [chuckles] at the show. We’ve got a good mix of stuff. And obviously, the classic, “Through the Fire and Flames.”
The Taylor song must go over well these days.
It's been pretty crazy. I definitely mess around with them, I tell the audience, “This is probably your only chance to be able to do a circle pit or headbang to a Taylor Swift song. So, be that 1% in the world to be able to do it!” It's been fun, and people have been talking about it a lot, actually.
I think music is something that you can learn forever and get better at continuously in your life. It’s a lifetime journey, right? So, I would say Warp Speed Warriors is a collective of everything I’ve done in my life — a snapshot of my life in terms of my achievement in music.
I’m learning a lot, still. If you go back to the previous album, or the first album, you can see a real gap between what we’ve learned.
Interesting. Can you expand on that?
Well, I think when you start off playing music, you just think about yourself — how you write your music. I will say at the beginning, when we first started, we just obsessed about trying to get our unique sound. We really had to lean into it — what we do, that’s different from everyone else out there.
We were known for playing fast, melodic and intense music, with some kind of humor and fun to it. So, we really leaned into it, and made every single song have those elements, for four albums in a row.
Then everyone said, “DragonForce is the fast band,” and after the fourth album, we were able to play midtempo songs, slower songs, experiment a bit more. Because, obviously, we like more than one style of music. This makes music more fun. You only live once, so to only play one style, it's kind of like you wasted your life in some way.
What are your memories of establishing DragonForce’s aesthetic early on?
I think it’s just about being extremely stubborn. A lot of artists, they have a vision, right? And if you have that vision, you’ve got to follow through, because everybody’s going to tell you you’re wrong. Everyone told us we were wrong, and we weren’t going to get anywhere.
I think that was one of the drivers that made us lean into it even more — to have more fast songs, more guitars, be more over the top. And we still live by that. When you go to a DragonForce show, there is more of everything, there’s the production — everything we can fit onto that truck, we have on that stage.
We don’t hire people to do the production for us. We actually, hands on, do it ourselves. The other guitar player, Sam [Totman], built those stage props himself — cutting up wood, painting, doing all the stuff. I programmed the show, to synchronize the video and audio, to make a full experience.
As you get older, you look at music not just as how you play the song, but what the audience sees when you perform. That makes it even more great, because I can learn about playing guitar better. And then, I can learn about production or audio; there’s so much to learn.
And by learning more stuff, I can craft my own style — not just depending on fast, intense, long guitar solo songs. The whole package of DragonForce is beyond just the audio now. When you go to the show, the visual part has our own identity.
You know, I can’t complain. Music is just so fun. There’s just so much more creative stuff you can get into. It’s fulfilling, at the same time, to learn something new.
I’m curious about the conditions in which people told you guys you were wrong.
You know, I just said that to a fan at VIP. They bought one of our early albums — I think the second album, Sonic Firestorm, and they said, “Why haven’t I seen the original in print for a long time?”
I told him, “Look, I remember when this album was about to come out, the record label we were signed to said, ‘You guys will never make it in America. Your music will never fit in America. We’re not going to release there. Forget about it.” Obviously, all that led to a GRAMMY nomination four years later.
So, obviously, I didn’t listen to him at all. You grow your thick skin, right? To do what you want to do in music. I always say it’s never too late to start playing guitar, never too late to start playing music, never too late to do anything.
I'll tell you how crazy I am. I didn't want to learn another recording software after doing Pro Tools for 20-something years. And I just learned it two weeks ago, Ableton Live. I reprogrammed the whole show, all the changes, media effects, the video screen onto Ableton Live, and I finished after two weeks — every day on the tour bus.
Tell me more about being a young guy, increasingly fixated on the guitar.
I used to play like eight hours a day. When I first started playing guitar at 16, I thought I was too late because you see a lot of musicians starting much earlier. But I realized you can't start something until you're inspired. Something hits you and you want to do it.
My process was: play guitar every second I had. In school when there's a break time, lunch break, I had the guitar. I always played. I got home, I played the guitar. And when I went to bed, I made sure there was music continuously being played while I was asleep.
Let’s talk about the creative process behind Warp Speed Warriors. What was the first tune that really got hammered in, where you all thought “We have a record”?
To be honest, nothing, actually. We work on everything together, and we call it the league — like a football league. "OK, this one is winning, this one is sounding better. Okay, we better work on this one. This one's better. Needs some work." And we slowly work on everything to bring it all at the same level. That's how we always do it on each album. No one gets left behind.
We hadn’t done an album since 2019 and it still feels like you don’t have enough time, believe it or not. Every time, it’s a rush. And this time, doing the collabs suddenly created double the amount of mixing, for more versions.
I think the biggest problem we always have is: when we make an album, we have to go on tour. It breaks the groove. Sometimes you kind of lose it. I know it feels fresh to come back, but sometimes you just want to finish it as soon as possible.
But I would say, for an album that you work long enough, if it still sounds good after it’s been finished for two years, then it's good. You don't bother it.
Bring the Warp Speed Warriors process to the finish line.
It was actually quite stressful to finish it, to be honest, because of all the collab versions. What have I done to myself?
Because we’re not only talking about the collab version of the audio; I did a separate video edit for the collab version of the same song. When I delivered that album, it was a relief for me in certain ways. Like, Oh, finally done.
Now you have to deal with doing less creative stuff, like editing videos. There's creative in that, but playing the guitar, where you got to put in your best performance, that is the hardest thing. That is a snapshot of your life people are going to remember forever.
I guess when I finished all my guitar solos, that was a relief, actually. Rhythm is easier. Solos are much harder.
Are you a punch-in guy? Do you agonize over every second? Or do you just let it fly?
The older I get, the more I let it fly. Press the button. If it doesn’t work, press it again. Just record the thing. In the old days, I would press it, record it, and zoom in and look at the waveform to see if I was perfectly on time with the grid or not. It was so bad — an OCD kind of thing.
But now I understand. When you listen to older albums — the best albums, the classic albums — they’re not on the grid. They sound better.
You’ve spent the last few years designing a new guitar to play on stage. Let’s hear about that.
I was given a thumbs up from PRS guitars to make whatever I want. I’d manipulate drawings on the computer and send them pictures, and they would make it. It took, I guess, four years, using the best material they can get their hands on.
I guess people get a bit shocked by how I treat the guitar that was made that expensive. I just treat it like a tool. I throw it every night. But one thing is so great on this tour that I really like was some of the local technicians working the show; they were big guitar fans.
I said, "Well, just plug it in, go and play it." They're all worried they're going to scratch it. “Just play it, hit the whammy bar, pull the string, bend the strings, it doesn't matter. Whatever you do will be less than what I do.”
I'm really aggressive on the guitar. And seeing the smile of people when they play a guitar like that has made me really happy. They go, "Wow, I can't believe it. I've never played something like this."
Can you go into the specs a little more?
I don't know if you're too familiar with PRS guitars, but it's unlike any other PRS guitar. It's easy to play and it's still got the great sound that you expect from PRS guitars.
The way I approach the guitar is this. I'm not that great of a guitar player, so I need something that is the easiest for me to play. I need something that makes life much easier for me, so I'm approaching it in that way that I need all the assistance I can get. So, it is really the easiest guitar to play while sounding great with all the pickup sounds that I want from a single coil, classic single coil sound, all the way to a humbucker that screams at you. So, I try to design it that way.
I have 300 guitars, so I have enough guitars of reference to know what I like about the guitar. It's been fun designing something like that. I never dreamed as a kid that a company like that would say, "Well, do whatever you want. Here you go."
You play guitar in DragonForce and you own 300 guitars. You don’t think you’re “that great of a guitar player?” Are you just being humble? What’s up?
I always say that me and Sam have never said we're great guitar players. We're students of the art forever.
If I think I'm a great guitar player, better than anyone else, that means I really need to learn. Because there's so much stuff out there from acoustic stuff, jazz stuff. I love listening to so much guitar and sometimes I wish I could play like that. I wish I could spend the time and play like that. But at the same time, I also say to myself I cannot try to play like someone else. I can only be me.
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