Warming up

[nicolaievich]

My question is simple... Is it really necessary to warm up? if so, how much time to do it? playing what? and in which ocassions?

I hope this is not a trivial question...

Nicolas

[mattm]

i almost always warm up with bach's prelude in C Major from book 1.  And some chord progressions some times, or maybe I'll play a couple pieces from memory, then I'll start tackling problem areas and knew material etc.

[cfortunato]

I don't know if it's necessary as much as useful.  Warm up with something you know, or scales, or improv.  I don't know that it makes me play better, but it makes it more likely that I'll be "into" the practice.  If I just jump into practicing, I get tired and my attention flags fairly quickly.  If I do something else first, it doesn't.

[thalbergmad]

I warm up with trills.

All different combinations of fingers and in thirds and sixths.

10 to 15 mins does the trick.

[m1469]

My question is simple... Is it really necessary to warm up? if so, how much time to do it? playing what? and in which ocassions?

I hope this is not a trivial question...

Nicolas

I do not treat my warm-ups as traditional warm-ups.  Sometimes I will use a piece that I am trying to test my memory with as my first experience with the piano that day.  Lately I am using musical shapes that a friend has helped me with  and it is fun for me to do too and feels like improvisation. 

There was a time in my life, for the span of about 6-8 months where I did "technical exercises/warm-ups" everyday to start out with.  I would spend 2+ hours everyday at the start of my practice session just doing those.  That is the only time I have ever devoted to such things. 

At this point, I prefer what I have mentioned above, or using a piece like a Bach invention or some minutes of improvisation to get myself in the piano-mode.


m1469 

[ted]

I have not "warmed up" for many years. After a few minutes playing I am as "warm" as I shall ever be. The expression "warm up", like "practice" , implies there exists another state which is "the real thing". I see all my playing as "the real thing". Time is too precious to do otherwise. The "warm up" trail of reasoning might lead me to think of my playing as comprising one "real" event and a big swag of "dummy" events - practices, warm-ups, warm-ups to practices and so on - leading up to it, resulting in only a small percentage of my playing time being "real music".

No thanks. Every time I play I like to make real music and enjoy it.

[rc]

Hmmmm... Not really, I usually just dive right in. On a different piano I might play something easy for me to get used to the feel of the piano.

I don't really notice anything too physical about piano that needs warming up. Maybe if the room is a little chilly and my fingers are cold, I usually drink loads of hot tea which will deal with that anyhow.

To mentally prepare. I suppose I sometimes need to forget the trivialities of the day, but I don't usually do that at the piano. What I do to mentally prepare is listen to some music, after about 10 seconds of daydreaming, piano is all I can think of... Or if I'm tired and am nodding off, then I guess the only thing to do is have a nap.

[burstroman]

Three of my favorite warm up pieces are the Brahms-Bach Chaconne transcription,  the Weber Rondo in C major (Sonata #1), and "Comme le Vent" by Alkan (at a moderately quick tempo).

[contrapunctus]

Never warm up, ever. Complete waste of time. Just hop right in. Now if your joints and muscles are stiff and cold, soaking them in warm water or warm air should do the trick.

[Kassaa]

Warming up is necessary. I know someone who played Prokofiev's seventh sonata without warming up, and after that he couldn't play for 6 months. Warming up with trills, scales, arpeggios, some bach inventions will do the trick. Contrapunctus is absolutely wrong on this one.

[crazy for ivan moravec]

Warming up is necessary. I know someone who played Prokofiev's seventh sonata without warming up, and after that he couldn't play for 6 months. Warming up with trills, scales, arpeggios, some bach inventions will do the trick. Contrapunctus is absolutely wrong on this one.

it's possible that it was a build up of tension from years of a habit playing heavy pieces like the prokofiev sonata without proper warm up.

yes it's physical... only if you integrate it with the mental. otherwise, it's not warming up for the sake of "heating up" the fingers only. it's actually also for the brain. u know, this is how a five note scale feels like, a c minor scale, arpeggio... etc. once you get your brain into "piano/practice mode" then everything else will follow smoothly without tension. then you can now start with solving technical and musical problems.

so i guess, warming up with scales, arpeggios, trills will do the trick just as a lot of us here would say. only that IMO, we shouldn't take the phrase "warm up" literally as warming/heating up the muscles. it's like we would like to familiarize ourselves with some musical stuff (theory, sounds, etc.) before we play/work on some music to avoid building up physical tension (we build up physical tension when we are not familiar with something mentally, wc could lead to injury if done in years, like the example of prokofiev sonata above... don't we get physically tensed performing on a bad piano that we have not rehearsed with?).

so/but, i'd like to say that warming up is 40% physical and 60% mental.

in cold places however, you mght want to do what Glenn Gould did, soak in lukewarm water... or hair dryer for Stanislav Ioudanitch (spelling?) now this is purely a physical situation and holding a hot cup of tea will help... but you don't need to tire yourself too much of scales and trills before a performance just to heat up in a cold place.

[demented cow]

Could it be that the people who don't feel any kind of need to warm up have a more advanced technique than those who do?
For average players like me, warming up is an absolute physical necessity. For example, I'm working on Chopin op 10/4. If I play it cold, it will be a mass of wrong notes and appreciably slower than if I warm up for 10 mins. I play 10/4 twice daily, and the second time is always better at a faster speed, despite some fatigue. In fact, even slow pieces sound much lousy if I play them cold.

FWIW my advice: I found I have less trouble playing something cold accurately if it doesn't involve many thumb turns. And it seems a good idea to start with something using all fingers. So I mostly warm up with:
-some Hanon 5 finger exercises
-a 5 finger ex. based on the passage in the Waldstein 3rd movement just before the coda (with the left hand simplified so there are no thumb turns in it)
-Chopin 25/1 (which is thumb-turn-free till the arpeggios at the end).
Then come some random scales and arpeggios.

PS Does anybody have info on whether there are professional and/or famous pianists feel the need to warm up? All I know is that Arrau said he didn't and Horrowitz apparently didn't (my guess from the fact that he arrived at at least one concert only a few minutes before he was due on stage).

[pianistimo]

professionals probably have a piano at home that they worked their rep until late into the evening.  i would think they'd have some sort of run through in the morning - but maybe i'm wrong.

for myself, working toward the goal, i find that before juries - i am most warmed up after at least one hour.  to do more would wear me out, to do less would be to risk not playing as connectedly and with the kind of pedalling that i would wish.  loosening up the wrist and ankles are important for me - as well as getting an image in my mind of what each piece means to me (and setting tempos, one last time).

[pianogeek_cz]

One recent story on warm-up...

I was playing the Revolutionary etude on our school's annual Christmas concert yesterday - in the morning (for students) and in the evening (for parents). I had just two or three minutes to warm up for the first one... LH was getting stiff at times, and overally it was rather sloppy.  I did some hour of warming up on Dohnanyi before the evening concert - which turned out very well. I'm rather certain that it was due to the excercises...

The moral: -DO- warm up. It helps. But I don't think an hour-long warm-up is necessary every practice session, just before performances and such...

As to what to warm up with: I use Dohnanyi, mainly nos. 1-8, scales, arpeggios... The usual lot... It works for me, and I haven't found anything yet that would work better.

[ted]

I think demented cow makes an interesting point here. However, it may perhaps not be a question of having an advanced technique but simply a different one. A clue lies in what was said about the end of the Ab study. When I read that, it registered with me that I very rarely pass the thumb under anywhere, and certainly not in those arpeggios. Practically all my playing comprises finger strokes and jumping - because it has always come easily to me, even as a kid, when I was told it was "incorrect". Being the sort of person I am I took no notice of anybody and went my own way regardless.

But demented cow is right, there is something more strenuous in moving the thumb sideways all the time (sideways relative to the hand - the thumb itself is naturally sideways) rather than straight up and down. You can easily get to the point where you don't notice it in single note passages but I've always found playing double notes with thumb flexion takes an awful lot of energy. Whereas playing with rapid finger strokes and jumps, say in Chopin 25/6, is much easier, faster and more reliable - for me - possibly not for some.

I realise I am an odd-ball concerning physical technique, which is why I hesitate to put forward opinions here. But in this case, I think demented cow could be right, provided "different" is substituted for "advanced".

[ada]

Well I'm a kind of average player but I don't know if my situation is normal. I warm up with Bach inventions, but the problem is, I start really getting into them, and want to do a whole pile  until I've been playing inventions for two hours and I'm either tired or I've run out of time.

This is easy to do with the inventions because each one is so unique and challenging in its own way.

I console myself with the fact that I'm getting better at the inventions but I'm neglecting other stuff. How do you stop getting carried away with your warm up to the detriment of everything else?

Maybe I just don'[t practice for long enough?

[cfortunato]

[[The expression "warm up", like "practice" , implies there exists another state which is "the real thing". I see all my playing as "the real thing". Time is too precious to do otherwise. The "warm up" trail of reasoning might lead me to think of my playing as comprising one "real" event and a big swag of "dummy" events - practices, warm-ups, warm-ups to practices and so on - leading up to it, resulting in only a small percentage of my playing time being "real music".

No thanks. Every time I play I like to make real music and enjoy it.]]

Ted: This is one of the best pieces of piano advice I think I've ever read.

[zheer]

I didnt think warming up ment actually geting warm, i thought it was a state of feeling ready to start something. I dont feel that hours of scales is a good idea, however i love to start with a few Chopin Etudes, they seem to stretch the fingers , wrists and  hand very well, and they remind me haw to play the piano, i forget sometimes. Its just a thought i might be wrong,

[paris]

I dont feel that hours of scales is a good idea, however i love to start with a few Chopin Etudes, they seem to stretch the fingers , wrists and  hand very well, and they remind me haw to play the piano, i forget sometimes.

well lucky you. i absolutely hate feeling when i'm trying to play chopin etude at full speed in the morning. it always sounds awkward, fingers are like refusing to work properly
i usually don't warm up, just start to play. sometimes i go through some dohnany exercises which i find good stuff if you need fast warming up

[rc]

well lucky you. i absolutely hate feeling when i'm trying to play chopin etude at full speed in the morning. it always sounds awkward, fingers are like refusing to work properly
i usually don't warm up, just start to play. sometimes i go through some dohnany exercises which i find good stuff if you need fast warming up

hahah, well that's just morning-fist! I can barely walk first thing in the morning... Most of the time I don't even try.

[nicolaievich]

The moral: -DO- warm up. It helps. But I don't think an hour-long warm-up is necessary every practice session, just before performances and such...

I am sure it helps, and I think the same way as you pianogeek, it's not necessary to do the warm up thing before starting each practice session, but it is necessary before a public performance.
I like that of mental warm up 

[demented cow]

I have another question, but first some background: Ted in his 2nd post above said he always uses the method others call 'thumb-over' (=moving the whole hand rather than moving the thumb laterally in scales etc.; thumb-over has several advocates on this forum, e.g. Bernhard). Ted suggests that maybe the reason why he doesn't need to warm up while I do is that he doesn't use thumb turns, which are precisely what I can't do without warming up.
My question to other people who don't need to warm up: Do all of you use thumb-over? If it turns out that many other non-warmer-uppers use thumb-over, then maybe that would be an argument in its favour.
(I would really appreciate some responses because I'm wondering whether to change to thumb-over, which I have never used, and I want to find out whether it's worth reworking my technique so radically.)

[ted]

demented cow:

It might be wise to use "both" rather than "either/or" depending on circumstances, and gradually introduce the new way into the mixture little by little, so to speak. A radical externally applied direction might upset the delicate balance of your steady-state system, to use an analogy. Also, there could be other factors at work, psychological and musical, which are peculiar to me. It is not easy for me to analyse these latter with respect to my own playing. Indeed, there is precious little motivation to try, as everything seems to be working all right without thinking about it.

[mschopinliszt]

It all depends on what i've been doing prior to coming to the piano for practice.  If aerobics, the blood is circulating just fine.  But if i'm coming to piano *cold*, i play all 12 Major scales, 4 octaves, quarter= 144.  Takes about 3/4 minutes...then the fingers are ready for ANYthing.  Works for me.

[sharon_f]

-PS Does anybody have info on whether there are professional and/or famous pianists feel the need to warm up? All I know is that Arrau said he didn't and Horrowitz apparently didn't (my guess from the fact that he arrived at at least one concert only a few minutes before he was due on stage).

Rudolph Serkin was notorious for his warm-ups. His daughter has been quoted saying he sometimes would practice up to 9 hours before going on stage. And eight hours of that was scales, arpeggios, etc. Only an hour was spent on the actual music!

As for myself, I am "old" and have "old" fingers. I always need to warm up.

[pita bread]

It's fine to warm up however you want for regular practice, but you still need to be able to fire off your pieces in performance with little or no warm up. As a student, you're not going to often have the opportunity to be in a practice room right up until your performance time.

[jamie_liszt]

 Flight of the bumblebee played afap gets my fingers goin!!

[nicolaievich]

Every time I sit at the piano I play a little passage of the Rach's #3, and it turns me on. I play from the Allegro at measure 69 to the end of that first little Cadenza. It sounds amazing and it makes your fingers move. 

[llamaman]

I go through technique and hanon before any piece work. That's all really.