Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, your warm up is extremely important before starting your practice session.
Why?
I’m glad you asked!
Your warm up is not only warm up your instrument, which out of the case will be cold, out of tune, and possibly unyielding, but your fingers, mind, and breath as well. It doesn’t take that long to warm up so why skip it?
It’s kind of like stretching at the gym, except you probably won’t give yourself a charlie horse because you started doing deadlifts before stretching out your calves. Ouch!
Anyway…
Your warm up should consist of long tones, scales and maybe a few exercises before you get into etudes and piece practice.
Long tones
Most of my students hate long tones. I think because they feel boring or uninspiring. For me long tones accomplish two things.
1) Long tones make me aware of my breath, tone, and intonation before I even start to practice pieces, which allows me to adjust these accordingly to get the best sound possible.
2) Since the long tone exercises I do are based on the full range chromatic scale I can easily spot any mechanical issues with my clarinet. It’s so frustrating to start practicing, having skipped your warm up, only to realize that you can’t complete your intended practice because some pad is leaking or something else is misaligned and broken.
This cat personifies my annoyance when my clarinet breaks. Ugh.
Practice Tip: When you are playing your long tones, close your eyes, listen to the note. Is it clear? Bright? Breathy? Does it have an overtone present? How does the reed feel? Is it too soft or too hard? Can you feel the breath as it leaves your lungs? Can you feel the breath as you inhale? Are you using your lungs to their full capacity or are you breathing shallowly?
Use long tones as way to listen to your sound and refine it. You want to have the best tone possible and long tones allow you one on one time with your tone that playing scales, etudes, and pieces just don’t allow for.
Here are a couple examples of long tone exercises
(Coming Soon! A downloads page where you can get copies of long tones and exercises for all levels!)
Beginner long tone exercise – does not go over the break
Intermediate-Advanced -Register Key Exercise
Scales
No matter your level you should be playing some sort of scale exercise every practice session.
For beginner students on clarinet I suggest starting off with G major in the lowest octave so that you aren’t forced to go over the break yet. (example shown below)
After you’re able to go over the break (on clarinet that’s third line B) then start working through the circle of fifths, focusing smoothness, evenness of tempo, and speed.
You can also start practicing simple arpeggios in your warm up. For beginners, pentatonic warm ups are great. Example below.
For intermediate students I like to use the Baermann and Klose technique books since both have great exercises to work on, but you can also just work on any scale in thirds, fourths or fifths. These scale exercises are great for getting used to interval jumps.
Here’s an example of the G major scale in fourths.
So like stretching at the gym, your musical warm up allows you to asses not only yourself but your instrument and is important to the success of any practice session.
So go ahead! What are you waiting for? Get practicing!
Coming up next: Tips and Tricks for Learning New Notes!
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