Don Felder – HuffPost 4.12.13

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Don Felder: I think the best advice I could give any new artist is to be as prepared as you possibly can. I spent years in the recording studio, learning how to make records, working six days a week and making fifty dollars a week. But it wasn’t about the money, it was learning how to make records. I spent thousands and thousands of hours teaching myself how to play guitar, how to sightread, how to compose…everything. So when I finally had the opportunity presented to me, I could go into any studio and know how it worked, I could walk onto any stage and play as good as a I possibly could. At that point, if your talents aren’t up to par or you aren’t artistically relatable to people, then there’s nothing you can do about it. But the key is to prepare, prepare, prepare. Even today, I play guitar anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple of hours, just looking around and trying new things. It’s like a keyboard on a typewriter. It’s not the keyboard, but what you write with it, and it’s not the characters that you type, but the words that you say. So the more you prepare for that opportunity when it presents itself, the better chance you’ll have of being successful.