Warm Up - Maintenance

One of the greatest things about a warm up is that it maintains your current level of playing and often pushes it forwards a little bit.

I think it's often logical to compare musicians lives to athletes lives (although I'm not an expert on sports I do read a fair bit about it). In football for instance there's always a whole range of exercises that the whole team do together in order to maintain their form and their skills. They don't at this stage of the day focus on improvement or weak sides to their skills or game. Just maintaining. Work on weakness, and practice matches comes after the maintenance work has been done.

If a tennis star has a good first serve but a weak second serve and as a result only practices the second serve, then eventually the first serve will suffer as will other aspects of their technique. The tennis player needs to maintain the level of his first serve whilst improving the level of the second serve.

It's the same with playing instruments. I don't have time to practice double stops, shifting exercises, etudes, bowing exercises, scales, dexterity exercises, complex co-ordination exercises every day. I also have to spend a little time maintaining my general technique before I can focus on the specific challenges of repertoire.

Here's what I do, and there's no magic. Everybody knows about them and the importance of them but everyone likes to avoid them...

Scales and arpeggios (hooray!) cover the whole instrument and can be practised in all kinds of speeds, with a multitude of different bowings and fingerings, with all kinds of different rhythms. If you can find various ways of executing scales and also vary the scales you play on a day to day basis then you will have maintained your technique well. In addition you can have a special focus for the day in the form of an exercise.

Here's what I do to vary the scales and to create daily challenges:

1. I choose a new key every day. Major, next day it's relative minor, then I go down the circle of fifths to the next major (C major - a minor - F major - d minor etc).

2. Every other day is slurred, and every other day is separate.

3. I use a metronome and acceleration (two notes per beat - 4 notes per beat - 8 notes per beat etc).

4. I play through the scale cycle first then I work at and improve it afterwards.

5. After the acceleration exercise is done I choose a rhythm and/or bowing and play the same scale in this new way. This is very good for coordination and the bow control. (a simple example of this is two notes slurred and two notes separate in a dotted rhythm).

6. I do this sequence from 1-5 first for the scale, then for the arpeggio in the same key.

7. After I have been through both scales and arpeggios I play an exercise and then I work at it. Currently I choose from two different shifting exercises, three bow exercises, one octave exercise, one exercise in thirds, and two position exercises.

This all takes me about 30-45 minutes depending on how much of a perfectionist I'm feeling or how little time I have. After my warm up I tend to feel pretty good! Physically I am warm but I'm also quite alert technically, feel in control of what I'm doing and my mind is sharp too. If you're really short of time you can really shorten down this warm up by just doing the play throughs of the acceleration scales without the practice afterwards which can be necessary some days.

Initially it takes a bit of working out what you're going to be doing and it takes a bit of getting used to so I recommend adding one part every other day for two weeks so that it isn't too overwhelming with new things to think about (first scale with acceleration 2-3days, then scale with acceleration plus scale with funny rhythm/bowing 2-3 days, then acceleration scale, funny rhythm/bowing scale plus acceleration arpeggio 2-3 days etc etc). After you have managed to stick to it for a month you will not want to stop!

Good luck!