Warming Up at Work
I've mentioned before that it takes me at least an hour of solid playing to properly warm up. This is inconvenient when I only have an hour or two to practice on a given day. I must spend an unreasonable portion of my allotted time either warming up or playing under my potential.
It's usually my timing and inter-hand synchronization that requires this daily fine-tuning. I'm starting to think that my picking hand is the bottleneck. My fretting hand feels nimble enough after just a few minutes of playing and stretching, but my picking feels clunky for much longer.
I discovered a solution the other day at work. I frequently have leftover picks in my pockets, which I always empty into my desk drawer in the morning. I grabbed a pick, held it with my (relatively) new grip, and ran it back and forth on my desk surface. The motion and angle were as if playing lap steel with a pick. Not quite ideal, but it got my muscles working. Any time I wasn't typing or mousing, I went back to my little pick scrapes. When there was music around, I'd play in time.
When I finally went home to practice that evening, I felt like my warmup was already done the moment I picked up my guitar. This will come in handy.
Mark Wein (25 Jun 2009 at 7:22am)
I liked this so much I posted a link to it from the forum on my lesson site for my students to read http://markweinguitarlessons.com/forums/showthread.php?p=79299#post79299
Thanks for the tip!
Mark
Joe (25 Jun 2009 at 7:28am)
Thanks Mark. I'm pretty excited about this myself. I feel like a new man, picking with more assertion than I ever have before.
Mark Wein (25 Jun 2009 at 7:38am)
No problem! I've really been trying to improve my right hand attack both for alternate picking and rhythm guitar...since I teach guitar all day as I've been working on things with students I notice that my wrist is really taking a few hours to work properly...when I saw your post on this I decided to try the "warming up" and its starting to help a bit already...good stuff!
How to Hold a Guitar Pick | Deft Digits (3 Jul 2011 at 1:56am)
[...] one in 2009. I wrote about it at From the Woodshed in the post, New Picking Technique. Also see Warming Up at Work, in which I used the same exercise outlined above to get my picking muscles going before I could [...]