The Best Warm-Up Routine for Pianists
1. Warm Up Routine?!
As a pianist the idea of “warming up” might be a foreign concept. Many players sit down at the piano with limited time and with the aim of getting things done right from the very start. Yet our fingers and our brain are often not yet primed to make the most of a practice session and as you improve on the piano, your ability to have complete control over your physical and mental capabilities becomes increasingly important.
So what’s the best way to prime yourself in order to get the most out of a practice session?
2. Scales
It will come as no surprise that scales are one of the best ways to help warm up both your fingers and mind. However, not in the way that you might think.
Scales are an essential part of practice for a number of reasons, they help you understand key signatures, they help you automatically find the notes to use in any given piece of music and they help your technique. However if practiced intentionally, scales can also be a very good physical and mental warm up.
A teacher of mine used to say to me “when practicing scales, intentionally focus on the sound that you are creating”. The reason I was told this is because scales are often the first thing that we do when sitting at the piano and our mind is not ready to tune in to the nuances in sound that we are creating. If we go straight into playing pieces or playing scales without thought then we are going to miss out on valuable time to perfect gaining control over the instrument.
So in order to warm up using scales, play slowly, intentionally and focus on controlling the sound that you are creating. Once you feel like you have control of your fingers and you are focused, then practice quicker scales or move onto something like sight reading or pieces.
3. Case Specific Exercises
Our highest level of concentration is at the beginning of a practice session, so this is always a great time to work on some of the weaknesses in our technique. Focusing on something that requires our hands to work hard is also a great way of warming the fingers up if done in a controlled way.
While working on general techniques is great for your practice, I have found that the best way to improve is to target technical problems that you come across in pieces that you are learning. This is because not only are you motivated to solve the problem so that you can play the piece of music but it also reassures you that the technique is used in real situations rather than just training your hands to perform a random movement.
Some common books for technical exercises include “A Dozen a Day” for more beginner friendly exercises or “Hanon: The Virtuoso Pianist” for regular exercises. In both of these books there are exercises dedicated to learning specific techniques. If you find a difficult technique in a piece (such as a trill, leaping around, turns, chords etc..) then you can find an exercise that will be dedicated to helping you acquire that technique! Once again, its important to prime your mind as well by starting slowly, listening to the sound that you are creating and staying in control.
4. Personalised Exercises
Something that I often recommend to students is to create exercises to solve problems. Much like exercises from technique books, you can develop your own patterns that solve your own unique issues that is closely aligned to the piece you are learning.
Let’s say you are having trouble with a particular scale pattern in a piece, you can isolate this scale pattern and play it starting on each note of a scale.
Personalising technical exercises is a great way of saving time, targeting problems and warming up. It also means that if you are ever faced with a technical issue, you know exactly what to do. However, once again its always best to start slow, intentionally and listening to the sound that you are creating!
Matthew Cawood
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