different amps. Luckily I get all this stuff sent to my house to try when I get time. I’m kind of a nerd I guess.
“Even the guitar pickups make me excited! Except the soldering part! But things have changed so much with equipment. Gear’s gotten cheaper. Younger guitarists can get pretty good tone at a cheap price these days. Compared to before, now they make so many new guitars and things have really got better.”
So when you can choose any gear you want, what do you plump for? Apparently, loads.
“I’ve basically got a rack the size of a huge fridge that an American family would own,” he explains. I’ve got two Rocktron Prophesy II preamps that have the effects and everything. Two Mesa Boogie Stereo 2:Fifty power amps, Ibanez guitars, which I’ve used for years, and we’ve got some Peavey cabinets which are cool. Oh, and a bunch of cool little toys…”
Toys, you say?
“I’ve got this cool ring thing which kind of controls my guitar effects with my hand. It’s called a Hot Hand, which is cool.”
The careful deployment of such toys are an integral part of a DragonForce live show, as any fan who has witnessed the band’s talent for all-out metal entertainment will attest. Ask either Herman or Fred about the less serious elements of the DragonForce experience and they both happily agree that it’s not all supposed to be about po-faced virtuosity.
“You have a laugh, you know? You have to take it as a party atmosphere,” argues Herman, explaining the band’s attitude to playing a festival like Download. “You can’t go and be serious and think you’re going to do a clinic. we take the risk. I think we always make things more difficult for ourselves. I want to throw the guitar in the air…” Use trampolines, we suggest. “Yeah! Jump off and run. Everything that makes it a little harder for us! I ran across about six guitar cabinets yesterday, jumped and spun and then fell over on my ass. Which was kind of cool. Unfortunately they’re not going to show it on television. I’m kind of disappointed.”
But such hijinks should never be mistaken as being the point of DragonForce. For every onstage stunt there is a seemingly effortless moment of precision musicianship that belies a rarely mentioned dynamic within the band: the pressure each member feels to outplay their bandmates.
“We want to make a better album each time,” explains Herman. “A better guitar sound, better production, better everything. You have to push yourself. We always try to play on the album harder than we can live. We have to push it to the extreme until our fingers are bleeding. It makes us better when we do the tour. You’re playing stuff that’s more challenging to you.”...
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