Warm Up Piano Techniques

Today I want to give you some techniques for warming up your fingers. The best way to start is based on scales and chords. Start with the right hand and just do five note scales up and down the keyboard. Be sure to use both hands. Start slowly until your fingers start to loosen up and warm up a little and then speed up. You want to pay careful attention and make sure that you are hitting all of the notes with even strokes of the finger and not just flicking your fingers at them. Also be sure that every note has an equal volume.

Now move on to larger scales, harmonic scales, melodic scales, blues scales, etc. Maybe you'll want to try more than one octave on the scales. Try going up two full octaves and coming back down. Make sure that the weaker fingers are getting a workout. While you are doing this, turn on a metronome to make sure that you are keeping proper time.

As you practice from day to day, change up the scales that you warm up with. This will note only help you learn the scales, but will help prevent you from getting bored with the warm up session.

You can also practice the chromatic scale. I haven't talked much about the chromatic scale. It just consists of all 12 notes that make up an octave. You can start on any note you want and just hit all of the keys until you complete an octave. Or go for two octaves, it's really up to you and what you feel like doing.

Another warmup idea is to base your warmups on chords. Play solid chords first, say G in the root inversion, G in the first inversion, G in the second inversion. Do it with both hands to get them both limber and ready to go. After the solid chords do it again playing broken chords. Change up the chords that you play. Maybe use this time to work on a chord progression that you are trying to memorize.

There are a lot of ideas for warmups in this section and you certainly don't have to do them all each time. I've just included a lot of different ideas so you can change it up day after day and keep your practice fresh and interesting.

Don't forget to stop by the piano lessons section of PianoLessons.com for more educational videos.