finding files

I need a pointer for command line tools to find files. 'locate' and 'whereis' work OK for most things as long as they are in that database, but I need to pattern/filename match the way 'find' does things... but across multiple directories. As far as I can tell from reading the man page on 'find' I can only search the current directory, or a directory I specify when I type in the command. So, I want to search across multiple directories the way 'locate' does, but I don't want to use the database thing that 'locate' uses... I want to pattern match. Can 'find' do this? Is there a better way to do this from the console? C.