Whimsical Warm-Ups

This week's post is going to be all about warm-ups. We will be talking about the ins, outs, in-betweens and need to knows of warm-ups. So sit back and take some mental notes if you don't have a pen and paper.

Kid Warming Up On Mouthpiece

Brass Players Warming Up

Ok, so lets go over the start of the warm-up. You can either warm up with your mouth piece in your instrument or you can warm up with your mouth piece alone. The pros for warming up with up with your instrument are: your mouthpiece and your instrument are warmed up at the same time, you can tell the tone quality of sound you are producing. The cons are that its harder to produce a good sound. The pros of warming up on a mouthpiece first is that you can produce a better sound on your instrument. It's easier to play on your instrument afterward. The cons are you are only warming up on the mouthpiece, and you sound like a bee when you do it. I personally just warmup with my instrument and mouthpiece, mainly because I rush to get warmed up so I can work on things before we have to tune.


Now that you know what to choose when you are warming up lets actually talk about what to do when you warm up. When you first pick up your instrument or mouthpiece you should play your tuning note. Support your sound and play a Concert F if you are warming up for classical music and a Concert Bb if you are warming up or tuning for Jazz Band. So after you play F or Bb you go down a whole step until you are a partial lower than you started at.

After this you want to to some quarter note lip slurs. You will want to start out at low Bb or open fingering and go up by a partial until you are an octave higher than when you started and then you go back down in the same manor. When you are doing this make sure that you aren't articulating, its important to keep a loose embouchure when you are doing this. Like last time go down a whole step until you are a partial lower than you started.

Bb Scale 

Lastly is scales. So you are going to need a scale sheet for this. Usually you just go through all the Major Scales and then you can just carry on with what you want to do. These are the scales that you are going to want to play.

Bass Clef Major Scales

Treble Clef Major Scales

That's Basically all you need need to know about warm-ups in this post. Sorry if it got boring, I'll try and make it more interesting next post. Talk to you guys next post.