We all know that exercise is good for our bodies. I ride my bicycle almost every day and I love it. Get the blood pumping and you’re more ready for everything else you do that day. Exercise is good for our minds too, but when it comes to music, I hate playing exercises. I’m sure most of you do as well. This week many of us will be heading to Lodi for jamming and socializing and I doubt I will hear very many people doing exercises. it’s just not any fun and not having fun is the antithesis of why we gather together to play music. Who needs to waste time doing boring routine exercises when you already know how to play your instrument (well sort of) and can merrily hack away with other fun loving fellow jammers who could care less about all the breaks you massacre as long as you keep them well fueled with beer?
Exercises
We all know the type of people who play exercises. Sometimes they might be pickers whose parent made them practice the piano in order to justify all the money they spent on their lessons. Mostly they tend to be fiddle players who started out as violinists. My hat’s off to all those fiddle players who had the patience to stick with such a difficult instrument long enough to be able to play it. I have to admit they tend to be some of the best musicians you can find at a bluegrass campout, if you can find them.
Scales, ladder scales or folding scales. Finger busters. If you hate a particular exercise, that might be the very one to concentrate on because you’re isolating a weak area of you playing. Once you get the finger memory you can use that in your playing if your next improvised break allows it.
I like to play fiddle tunes. These can be exercises in themselves and are a lot more fun than scales or patterns because they sound more like music. Classical music fans would be unlikely to buy a recording of scales just to listen to them but an “etude” is a different story. If you know enough fiddle tunes you have learned many useful motifs that come up all the time in old time and bluegrass music.
Everybody should have a go to warm up exercise. A good one gets the fingers moving in familiar patterns and prepares you for what’s to come.
Let’s all practice our exercises now. We’ll thank ourselves for the preparation once we get to Lodi. But once we’re there it should be all business. If you play fiddle I’ll excuse you though.
