Warm Up

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I know several artists who warm up by merely putting the sticks in their hands. I’m not one of them. Some of those same performers are able to forego most of what I include in my practice sessions. More power to them. By the way, if you are a current student at Kent State and think you fit this category, you are mistaken. I appreciate the time spent doing this part of the practice session if for no other reason than it helps me to get my mind in gear.

Start with some simple passive stretching of the muscles in your hands, wrists, and arms. By passive I mean using one hand to stretch the other, which is not the same as just flexing the muscles. Bend the fingers back and forth as far as they will comfortably go. Then stretch the fingers laterally, that is from side to side. I do this by using the wrist of one hand to spread apart the fingers of the other hand. Do the same stretching of the wrists: back and forth and from side to side. Lastly, massage your forearms, including the area around your elbows. You may also need to loosen up your neck and shoulders.

Pick which instrument you are going to work on first. If you are only going to practice one instrument, well, that’s what I usually do. I’ve found that if I get thoroughly warmed up playing one instrument, that usually is enough so I don’t have to do it again if I switch instruments during the session. However, this may not work for everybody and you may have to allocate time for warming up on each instrument you play. Play exercises that use large muscle groups including your forearms. On timpani and snare drum this means full strokes with sufficient stick height to require using your forearms. I usually use a practice pad for this if I intend to work on snare drum. On marimba, start with double vertical strokes with changing interval sizes. I use the exercises 6-11 in my Mallet Keyboard Exercises book.

There are two things to keep in mind. The first is to play with proper technique. That means paying attention to hitting the right notes, the right locations on the instrument, stroke trajectory, consistency of volume, proper grip of the sticks, active posture (more on that later), and very stable rhythm. (Is the metronome on?). This isn’t the time to use for pushing the limits of your technique, so not too loud or too soft, not too fast or too slow.

That’s a lot of things to think about. But they’re all the same things you thought about yesterday, and the day before, and tomorrow. There is comfort in the familiar. (Notice that I didn’t say “complacency in the mindless”). Warm up exercises need to be simple and familiar enough so you can concentrate on all those aspects of correct technique. That kind of concentration is an effective way of calming all the other thoughts that were screaming through your brain before you started the session. I find that if I can be mindful during this first part of the session, I will have success in continuing this discipline of concentration during the rest of the practice time.

The second thing to focus on is the physical sensation of everything you do and everything else in your environment. This becomes easier as your routine becomes more automatic. Some would find this kind of awareness to be more of a distraction than a help. Those people possess a greater ability to control their thinking than I do, but I fought this lack of mind control for years to no avail. Somebody is going to sneeze during your performance, the clarinet is going to squawk the entrance, the lights are going to be too bright, you need to line up with the strings and you can’t hear their attacks, and you’re going to miss a note here and there. It’s how you react to these potentially distracting elements that determines whether they can derail your concentration. I never answer the door or the phone until I’ve reached a stopping place. Loud sounds in the hallway won’t stop by checking them out. I can hear my wind chimes, the rattling of the light fixtures, the sympathetic resonances of my gongs, the passing siren, and the wrong note I just hit without missing the next note.

The most important thing to concentrate on while warming up is the act of concentration itself. Everyone has to discover just how their mind wanders and either use that to their advantage or make the necessary adjustments.

The warm up portion of a practice session is primarily meant to prepare you to play for the next several hours, but for those who have not developed a routine for warming up, it may seem as though you could spend several hours just learning the exercises. The idea is to spend the time necessary to learn a few exercises that are very effective in preparing your hands and mind for work, and then repeat this routine until they are no longer brand new. I’ve been doing the same warm up routine for so long that I can play them correctly and stay in the moment instead of learning new exercises. New exercises are reserved for another segment of the practice session.

Look at the practice chart again and notice that I also included a day with minimal warm up and even a day without a warm up. In order to be prepared for anything, you have to practice everything, including those performances when you have to play with cold hands. Rehearsals and performances do not wait to begin until everybody is perfectly ready to play, and often no matter what your good intentions are, you haven’t had time to go through your routine. This is often the case for my students when they have to play for studio class. They’re wearing the same clothes they slept in, skipped breakfast to get to a crack-of-dawn class, and then sat through more classes until it was time to move and set up instruments for studio class. And then they have to sit through other people’s performances before they get to play. Ever have to play congas without getting warmed up? You just have to know how to do this.

Warmed up? (Or not…) Ready to play? What’s next? Take note of the time. How long did the warm up take? Write it down in your practice log. Oh, did I forget to mention the practice log? Well, how are you going to know what works unless to can remember what you’ve done? Once you’ve established an efficient warm up routine, you can start to make judgments about the amount of time it should take. A couple of years ago my warm up routine for marimba was taking 40 minutes. I thought I could trim that down to 30 minutes. I just didn’t want to be dependant on needing that much time to get everything in gear. So, let’s say the “minimal” warm up is 10-15 minutes.

I must admit that I don’t spend nearly as much time warming up on most instruments compared to the keyboards. That’s partly because I find other instruments have a much more “friendly” playing surface than the marimba and that the technique required to play many other instruments is not as physically complex. A timpanist might disagree, and a DCI champion snare drummer would scoff. It’s all good.

Next subject.