Some extremely obscure Johan De Farfalla trivia from a 2007 AMA on the Ultimate Metal forum
All this information (and way more) comes from this Ultimate Metal forum post from 2007, where a forum member managed to get in touch with Johan DeFarfalla himself via Email and hosted an "AMA" of sorts on the forum.
https://ultimatemetal.com/threads/what-ever-happened-to-johan-defarfalla.279650/post-5866162
I've never seen this forum post, or the vast majority of the info it contains, mentioned anywhere at any point, so I felt the need to share :>
- His fretless bass on Orchid was a 4-string, and was built by late Arne Arvidsson. I cannot find any info on Arvidsson building a bass besides Johan's; it seems he did guitars almost exclusively. I've seen some confusion on what the "Arvidsson" bass in the gear listing for Orchid was, and I was very curious myself. I'd thought I'd looked everywhere for info on this bass, but it was here the whole time. Never seen this info spread anywhere besides this forum post.
It is worth noting that the fretless bass on Morningrise could not have been the same bass, as that was a 6-string. I don't know what model it was, that information does not seem to exist anywhere on the internet whatsoever. The fretted bass on that album was supposedly a Yamaha.
- At least as of 2007, he had never listened to any Opeth beyond Morningrise.
- He was in a band called Crimson Cat before Opeth, which released 2 tapes in 1989 and 1990 (if anyone could possibly track these down, I would be eternally grateful and also extremely impressed; I cannot find even a lick of meaningful information on this band besides this one forum post, and not a single recording). It was described as "sleeze metal"
- He has exclusively played non-commercially since 1997
- It is common knowledge that he was fired from the band due to creative differences, however to be more specific, he's said he would have, quote, "created a much tighter band with a better production and less growl song", if he'd had the authority.
As a bonus, Mikael Åkerfeldt himself even commented in this thread to give his own input: https://ultimatemetal.com/threads/what-ever-happened-to-johan-defarfalla.279650/post-5869538
I cannot find any info on Johan post-2007 that has anything to do with music (only career and personal life stuff, which is on his Wikipedia article). I have no idea if he's even still playing. I hope he is, but there's no way to know without hearing it for myself.