Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Warm Up Routines

Violin playing has been around for 400 years or so, Meatball is surprised to see that there is virtually no special warm up routines for anyone short of being an advanced player.

Meatball wrote a set, not gonna show them here cus I dont want to scan them. But here are the items that should be included,

1. vertical, horizontal, and lateral finger movements
2. independence of fingers exercises
3. some finger expansion exercises
4. shiftings
5. intonation exercises (dominates, diminishes, and arppegios)
6. some double stop exercises
7. some bowing variations for etudes such as Kayser no 1, Kreutzer no 2, etc. Key strokes should be included

Remember to keep the entire thing under 30 mins, otherwise it would be too elaborated to be called a warm-up exercise set. No. 6 and 7 should be different everyday( or every week, depending on the player.)

There are other shortcuts such as combining the horizontal movement exercise, finger independence exercise, and double stop exercise, and finger expansion exercise into one or two exercises; Key strokes can be combined with selected bowing variations, etc.. However, the problem with this is that it will make the exercises a bit more difficult.

Also, one must make sure that certain things have to be done in order. For instance, vertical finger exercise must preceed any other exercises, shifting exercise has to be played before the intonation exercise ( assuming one plays more than 1 octave), and horizontal movement exercise has to be practiced before/with hand expansion exercise, etc..

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

哇! 英文版! 我讀起來有點慢, 不過還是很高興能知道一些專有名詞的英文寫法! 感謝分享! -- Swing

Meatball said...

Hi Swing,

Glad to see you again. I apologize for posting things in Eng. I am having some problems with my arms and it is just easier to type in Eng, that's all. :)