How to make the most of your finger warm ups
You started playing guitar, got a few riffs or chords under your belt and moved on to learning a scale. In this journey you may have learnt some finger warm ups or you’ve now realised you need something to help you develop speed and finger control a bit better to reach your guitar playing goals.
Some finger warm ups are great for your playing but sound and feel boring. However there are ways to make our warm ups more engaging and fun to play. In this guide I’m going to take you through:
- How to turn boring exercises into competitions against yourself
- How to choose warm ups that can be more enjoyable to listen to
- How to make those warmups the most engaging and fun
- How to turn these warm ups into tools for your improvising and lead writing
So let’s jump into it!
1 – How to turn boring exercises into competitions against yourself
This is a fairly simple Idea, but is definitely a more motivating way to practice these 1,2,3,4 style warmups. What you need to do first is make sure you know the exercise. Get the pattern or notes you’re playing into memory. We won’t be able to play fast until we memorise the thing we are playing. From there you follow these steps.
- Get a notebook and pen, and open up a metronome (Click here for an easy to use metronome)
- Start the metronome slow (around 80bpm) and play your warmup in time with the clicks
- Each time you get through the exercise with less than 3 mistakes, go up 5-10bpm
- Make a note of your fastest speed in your notebook
- Next time you do the exercise, start at a slow easy pace again (this helps with warming up, getting into the patterns again and helps you work on timing with slower speeds) and work up and try and beat your last recorded speed
Not that sometimes slower speeds can be harder than faster speeds as we have time to think, or our mind to drift. This is why I always say to play through some mistakes and keep going faster until you really can’t make it through the exercise.
Then if you want to finish on a win, go back to a comfortable speed and do an extra final run of the exercise. You may even want to track your comfortable speed as well in your notebook for reference.
We often won’t see ourselves getting better by just a few bpm, so this helps us see our smaller progress steps.
You can also get your guitar teacher or a friend/family member that’s willing to be your accountability buddy to check in each week and ask you your speeds.
2 – How to choose warm ups that can be more enjoyable to listen to
There are many ways to find more enjoyable warmup from just searching youtube and tab sites and picking the one that you like most. However this is relating to the next points in this guide/blog. What you want to do is find a warmup that is in a particular key (E Major, A minor etc) The easiest way to do this is to look for “Warm ups to practice the ____ scale”. If you are new to scales I would suggest picking the minor pentatonic scale. However if you have experience already, we can use the natural minor, the major scale, the Dorian mode, the Mixolydian mode, which ever scale you fancy.
I would suggest starting with the minor pentatonic and just picking a harder exercise unless you know you want to work on a particular scale though.
The reason for picking a warm up based around a scale is that this will be in key with our backing tracks.
My suggestions would be the string skipping exercise:
String Skipping Exercise Video Lesson
Or 1 I like even more, but is a little harder, the 3 Note Pentatonic Run:
The 3 Note Pentatonic Run Video Lesson
3 – How to make those warmups the most engaging and fun
Now you know the a warm up that fits into a scale, and have developed a comfortable speed using the metronome practice, it’s time to apply this to a more enjoyable fun way to practice.
What we’re going to do is find a backing track we like that is in the same key as our warmup. And then simple listen and get used to the tempo of the track. Once you feel ready play the exercise at a nice slow pace. Whole notes or half notes tend to work for the first run up and down. Once you’ve done this, we are going to double it to half or quarter notes, then double again if you can.
To get to these speeds you may need to use the metronome practice method, but this is far more fun.
Once you’ve done this over one track, try and find another track in the same key and do the same thing over a different beat, speed, genre etc.
You can then try moving the key up or down. So if your scale was in a minor key, we still need it to be minor. However we can swap from A minor to C minor, or if we were in Major from G Major to B Major.
For the example I’ve been playing in the videos we have been in A minor, so we can move this to any other minor key
4 – How to turn these warm ups into tools for your improvising and lead writing
Once you have got the previous points in this covered, this is actually quite easy to do. When you want to move from higher notes to lower notes. Or if you want to move from lower notes to higher notes. Just use a part of the exercise to get between these sections. I do this a lot to round off a section. You can use the exercise after some improv to get to the nearest root note, or to drop an octave.
I hope these tips have been helpful. Enjoy your playing, improv and writing and feel free to leave a comment for anything else you’d like me to cover.
What’s Next
To learn more about Guitar, lead playing, improvising etc, you have a few options:
- BLOGS – I will be posting more blogs in this series so you can read more here
- COURSES – I have an online guitar academy with video lesson courses that has been gamified. sign up for a 7 day free trial here
- PRIVATE LESSONS – For those near to Brisbane Australia I am offering private guitar lessons in Highgate hill email me at
rory @ guitar-ninja.com saying you are after lessons and letting me know the experience you have and I’ll get back to you quickly - GUITAR CLUBS – Also in Brisbane I run group improv and jam clubs in West End (Every Monday evening) you can see the information here or also e-mail me at rory @ guitar-ninja.com saying you are after lessons and letting me know the experience you have and I’ll get back to you quickly
If this was useful and you’d like to show your support without wanting any lessons, then please share the blog with other guitarists or groups. And follow me as an original artist. This is free and helps my reach.
www.roryprice.com