(Credit: TaurusEmerald)
Thu 11 December 2025 18:45, UK
In a world where every guitarist wants to rock out first, Don Felder was always interested in the craft behind his instrument.
Anyone could spend their days trying to pose in the mirror and maybe learn a scale here and there, but the kind of leads that Felder laid down with Eagles and during his solo career were all about trying to make a coherent statement whenever the spotlight was on him. A lot of that comes from practice, but Felder took it upon himself to learn from the greatest fretboard masters he could find.
For anyone of Felder’s generation, though, a lot of the best guitarists tend to all lead to Jimi Hendrix. There are a million different doors that were opened the minute Are You Experienced came out, but when Hendrix took a solo, he helped paint with musical colours that most people didn’t realise were on the spectrum yet. Here was a man on fire proving to everyone why he was the greatest, but Felder didn’t always need to hold himself to that standard, either.
Any Hendrix licks wouldn’t have worked on an Eagles song, and a lot of Felder’s musical vocabulary came from what he was hearing in his backyard. He had grown up in Florida around the time that the Allman Brothers Band first started making waves, and from the first moment that Duane Allman played slide guitar, everyone started to pay attention to the beautiful voice that could come out of the guitar.
And it’s not like Felder wasn’t a good student, either. From the first time his solo came in on ‘Already Gone’, he was already earning his nickname of ‘Fingers Felder’. Bernie Leadon could certainly hold his own next to Glenn Frey whenever he played, but getting Felder’s touch on their classic songs helped give them the rock and roll edge that Leadon’s country picking couldn’t really do.
A lot of it was homespun American rock and roll, but Felder also had another ear focused on what was happening half a world away. The British guitar scene had practically birthed hard rock guitar playing once bands like Led Zeppelin and The Who started making waves, but even for a subsection where Eric Clapton was considered a god, Felder knew that nothing was better than listening to Jeff Beck perform.
This was someone fully in control of their instrument, and Felder couldn’t imagine anyone else coming close to him, saying, “The best rock ’n’ roll guitarist I’ve ever met is Jeff Beck. He has the most brilliant dexterity and the ability to just play completely freely. Duane was a good guitar player but he was probably the most unique slide guitar player. But Jeff Beck, to me, is the most creative, innovative guitar player I’ve ever seen. He can play anything, literally.”
But it’s important to note the qualifier there: best rock ‘n’ roll guitarist. Duane’s style did have a semblance of rock and roll to it, but whereas most people put them in the same category as jam bands or the Southern rock acts that came after them, a lot of At Fillmore East has the improvisation you’d hear in jazz songs. Whereas with Beck, you’d be getting pieces of blues, but the heavy sound of rock was always what tied everything together even on fusion records like Wired.
Then again, the most important lesson that Beck ever taught Felder was that it was always important to keep getting better over time. Any other guitarist can find themselves growing stale after a while, but across every one of his albums, Beck made sure that he never got bored within his own sound.
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