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Warm Ups

Warm Ups
Creating a daily warm up, or routine, is a necessity. This can cover a wide range of exercises and you can use this time to incorporate your fundamental practice as well. Most teachers have their own ideas and their own version of a warm up. What I recommend is trying out everything that you can find. A lot of teachers have published their versions and they are available for free or for purchase online. A simple google search will get you to more warm ups than you could ever want. Take parts from each that you like and slowly build your own routine. I like to have one that lasts around an hour to really cover everything that gets me prepared for the day, but I also have a short 15-20 minute routine for days when I just do not have the luxary time. Here are some tips for building your own warm up:
1 - start with something slow. Find some simple buzzing exercises, both with and without the mouthpiece, and cover a limited range and get your face to start waking up
2 - breathing. It may seem weird to not start with breathing, but I have found more success with breath work once I have started to get my focus for the day. Find a couple of simple things to work through with breath. Make sure that they focus on taking deep breaths with different pacings.
3 - get to the horn. I like to jump in and cover the whole range of the horn right away doing some chromatic exercises. Then I slowly increase the intervals throughout my routine. I start with scale type studies, then move to things that are built around arpeggios, then I incorporate the 5ths and octaves exercises from the Farkas routine to finish things out.

4 - hit your weaknesses. Say your biggest weakness is your low range. Make sure you do low range exercises in your warm up! The Brophy book is an easy resource to find a few quick studies to work on.
5 - take a break! Once you are done, take a few minutes to get the horn off of the face. Go for a short walk, drink some water, watch something on youtube, just take a few minutes to relax!

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