Читать книгу Guitar Exercises For Dummies - Jon Chappell - Страница 20

IN THIS CHAPTER

Loosening your fingers and your mind

Practicing some single-note and chord exercises

You can pick up the guitar pretty much any time day or night, and you’ll be able to play it fairly well. But you get the best results with just a little bit of prep work (rather than picking up the guitar stone cold and trying to wail at top speed). That preparation, which is also well-known to athletes and physical fitness buffs, is the warm-up.

A warm-up is essential for many physical activities, such as sports and playing music, because you can’t play at the height of your abilities if you’ve recently woken from a sound sleep or have just come in from shoveling snow without gloves. You just know that you’ll be playing better after you’ve had the guitar in your hands in front of the fireplace for about an hour. And no wonder. That’s what warm-up routines do! They reduce the time between those states of guitar-readiness by giving your fingers the time they need to adjust to the activity at hand and play with optimum results.

In this chapter, we explore warm-up concepts for both the mind and the body (well, we limit the “body” part to pretty much the hands and fingers), and we suggest activities to try on and off the guitar. By performing just a couple of simple tasks — and sometimes just thinking about them — you can make your practice sessions a little more productive a little earlier on.