Difference between revisions of "Warm-Up Exercises"

Revision as of 15:11, 13 October 2014

ALWAYS WARM UP!!!!!!!! Warming up helps improve your playing and avoid injury. Be sure to warm-up both your fretting and picking hands. Your fretting hand needs to be stretched so that some uncomfortable chord shapes or finger-stretches don't push you into injury or cramping. This includes your wrist, which needs to angle in difficult positions as well as your fingers. Your fretting hand wrist and elbow need to be loosened up as well. All the muscles and ligaments involved in playing guitar (there are a lot in your hands) need to be given a gradual introduction to the workload you are about to put on them, to make sure they have good blood flow and nothing is out of place. When you start playing a gig or even recording, trying to hit that difficult lick can be a jarring shock to the biomechanics involved if they weren't warmed up.

The main thing to remember for warm-ups is to go slow. Ease your hands into the workload required for playing guitar. Your warm-up exercises should hit all the muscle groups you use during playing. You want to introduce all of them to a very mild difficulty, not a severe strain out the gate. If anything produces a sharp pain, back off and try to ease through it slowly. If it doesn't get better and in fact gets worse, you may already have an injury you need to get treated. Trying to push through the pain can often result in a catastrophic injury that prevents you from ever playing guitar again...or even worse.

Failure to warm-up can cause early onset of Carpal Tunnel or tendonitis.

Stretching

I like to spread the fingers of each hand and touch my palms and fingers together, then raise my elbows/lower my hands so my palms can no longer touch. When done correctly, you should feel each finger muscle get stretched - you should feel it through your palms and wrists all the way into your forearms. Then I rotate my wrists, so that my fingers point towards me. Then I turn my wrists in the opposite direction so they point away from. After giving all my fingers a good stretch as such, I pull my hands away from each other and ball them into a tight fist. Then I rotate each wrist in a circular motion to loosen them up as well as stretching my forearms on the other side.

Petrucci Chords

Again, be sure to go slow and back off if you feel any sharp pain. see Advanced Technique Exercises#Petrucci Chords

Chromatic Scale

see Chromatic Scale Exercises

Scales

Practicing various ascending and descending scales (be sure to play through the transitions from ascending to descending and descending to ascending) is always a good idea, especially the scales and positions you are likely to perform. You can find a giant reference of all the common scales at Ref: Common Scales, and full scale maps across the entire fretboard for the major and minor scales at Ref: Scale Fret Maps for all Major/Natural Minor Keys w/ CAGED breakdown.

For lots of exercises, see Common Scale Exercises.

Note: these exercises are better for warming up the right hand than the left. I'd rather perform the Petrucci Chords or Chromatic Scale exercises for the left-hand, as those have a more consistent emphasis on all the left-hand fingers.

Arpeggios

Just like scales, arpeggios are good exercise - focus on the ones you'll tend to use. Or at least the ones that give you fingers a good work out. There is reference for all the CAGED major and minor triads. It should be somewhat simple to alter these to fit other chord types, which are referenced at Ref: Mega List of Chord Fingerings/Voicings. For example, adding the minor 7th of dominant major/minor chords.

Rhythm

The best way to warm-up for rhythm is to play to a metronome or a good drummer. The first thing to get down is consistency, so all your notes fall on the beats and have equal duration. Metallica used to warm up by simply chugging palm mutes on the open low E string for a good 5-10 minutes. It seems simple until you try it.

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  x100
    pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm pm
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

Practice on at least 4 different speeds, with an extreme slow and a fast speed that is close to your maximum. Practice with all downstrokes, all upstrokes, and strict alternate picking. Obviously, the straight down or upstroke exercises will require a slower speed than the alternate picking. Also try different strings.

This same exercise works for strummed chords, although you'll likely need to reduce the relative speeds. Start by keeping the left hand constant, holding the same chord throughout.

Playing the same note or chord over and over is easy to get a consistent rhythm. Trying to keep that rhythm with runs or riffs or chord changes is another story. Once you establish a good right hand using the above exercise, you have to lock it in. Don't ever let your right hand wait to catch up with the left. If the left hand is slow to fret the notes, play them uncleanly. Throwing off your rhythm might sound ok playing in the bedroom but becomes painfully obvious in a band or recording context. Even playing solo, hearing it played back that inconsistent rhythm sounds pretty terrible. Unclean playing is also noticeably bad, but sounds less amateur. And its easy to get in the habit of sacrificing rhythm to attain synchronicity, which then becomes difficult to break. The other way around is going to be more noticeable to you and annoying and forces you to make the left hand sync to the right hand.

The kind of playing to get a good warm-up for rhythm will depend on the individual and the type of playing you perform. If you are a rhythm player, it may make sense to alternate between two strings or power chords or full chord changes. If you are a lead player, playing various scales ascending and descending, as well as arpeggios or advanced techniques like tapping and sweeps makes more sense.

The key thing is when you're jamming or playing along to your favorite song or trying to record a part, you may notice some riffs or chord changes or rhythms that seem impossible to nail. Make a mental or written log of these things, identify the specific parts of the licks or riffs or changes are giving you trouble, and try to break down why it's difficult. This will let you develop your own exercises that consist nearly entirely of such. It's helpful to alternate between sections of these parts and just chugging on single notes or a static chords like above.

Another thing to practice is throwing in accents. Start by putting accents on the beats:

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n 
    >     >     >     >     >     >     >     >  
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

    1  tr lt 2  tr lt 3  tr lt 4  tr lt
    >        >        >        >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--:|

tr lt = trip let; so 1  trip  let  2  trip  let ... etc.

    1  u  n  u  2  u  n  u  3  u  n  u  4  u  n  u
    >           >           >           >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

    1 t l n t l 2 t l n t l 3 t l n t l 4 t l n t l
    >           >           >           >
E-|:0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-:|

t l = trip let; so 1  trip  let  and  trip  let ... etc.
It may be easier to just say  1  n  uh  and  n  uh  2  n  uh  and  n  uh ... etc.

The faster the tempo, the harder it is to work those accents in. But they really help you keep a consistent rhythm - you know every 2, 3, 4, or 6 notes you should be making an accented downstroke on the beat. It's easy to hear when and in which direction your rhythm is falling off and make the correction. A consistent rhythm demands control and accents demand more control than static dynamics. That makes this a great warm-up.

Then you try trickier accent patterns, where accents alternate between downstrokes and upstrokes.

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n 
    >        >        >     >        >        >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n 
    >        >        >        >        >     >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n 
    >        >        >        >     >     >     >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

    1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n  1  n  2  n  3  n  4  n 
    >  >     >  >     >     >  >     >  >     >
E-|:0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-|0--0--0--0--0--0--0--0-:|

Finger-Stretching

see Advanced Technique Exercises#Finger-Stretching