Very effective warm up exercise!
Throughout
my years as a pianist, I've come to appreciate and value more and more the
power behind dedicating time to practice and warm up my fingers. There are a
wide variety of exercises that help us as musicians to become better at our
particular instrument and I've adopted this specific exercise I’m about to show you as one of my dearest.
I perform
this exercise every day for at least 10 minutes, and I also use it every time I’m
going to perform somewhere as a pre-warm up exercise. It is very effective and
it trains your fingers to play uniformly at the same time, with the added bonus
of warming up your fingers. This has proven even more effective in cold environments,
it can turn cold and hard to articulate fingers into fast reacting fingers with
better movement and articulation in a short period of time.
It begins in
the key of C with both hands, using our pinky finger on the left (or fifth
digit) and our first digit on the right. Then we will skip the following note
by jumping from C to E (skipping D) with both hands, using our fourth digit on
the left hand and our second digit on the right hand. Then we will move up note
after note until we run out of fingers (or once we hit A), then we will come
back the opposite way downward and we will find ourselves at a different
starting point than before, which will be D (the note we skipped in the first
place.) This will create an elevator effect where you will cover every single
white key by skipping only the second note every time you start the exercise,
like this:
After you've covered at least 4 octaves in the piano upwards with this exercise it will be time to reverse the exercise all together so that we can go back to the beginning
and come full circle. Once we get to G on the last octave, we will skip
downward the following note (in this case F) towards E, using our fourth digit
on the right hand and our second digit on the left hand. Then we will continue
to go downward note by note until we run out of fingers again (or until we
reach B) and we will go back up finding ourselves at a lower starting point
than before (or the key of F) the note which we had skipped before., like this:
Then continue
to descend until you reach the original C in which you started the exercise.
As you may
notice, this exercise is very effective and works every single one of our
digits in a clean and meticulous manner. My main advice to you if you’re new to
this exercise is to approach it slowly, felling every single digit hit the keys
one at a time. We are not necessarily looking for speed here, we are looking
for effective clean playing while warming up our fingers. Then as you progress
and the exercise becomes easier to handle, then add a little more speed. If you
can’t hear every single note an all fingers from both hands all together, then
you’re probably doing it too fast. Slow down and be patient and try again from
the beginning.
The goal is
to play the complete exercise without messing up once. Have fun and I hope this
exercise adds value to your practicing routine.
God Bless!
