Final Fantasy Prelude as a Warm Up | Warming Up #1 (Explanation in description)
9With all the buttery smoothness of a Crunch bar.
Every road has it's rough spots, but you need to drive through it to get to where you want to go. Even if the first thing you play in the morning sounds like as bumpy as what I played here, that's fine. That's the point of a warm-up; to get you in the groove and get rid of what rust was starting to build.
To try and keep things real, I recorded this while I was warming up, not after. I want to make sure I keep it realistic. If I'm touting this as a series for warming up, but I do all my warming up beforehand and just show off impeccable play, I feel like that'd set a bad standard.
Before I get to why warming up with arpeggios is a good thing, I should probably explain my choice of music. Arpeggios can be boring. Warm ups in general can be boring. When you've played for a number of years, you want to spice things up sometimes, hence my use of the Prelude as a warm up. That's not to say "Don't practice arpeggios" the way your teacher would make you, on the contrary, do those as well.
So, why arpeggios? Well, practicing arpeggios helps develop muscle memory, and given enough time, precision and speed. As you could probably imagine, all three of these things are really important for a pianist, or really any musician. I don't know how many videos in this series I'll do, but I'll probably show how to practice scales and arpeggios the traditional way in the next few entries of this mini-series.
The chords used in this arrangement of the Prelude, in order, would be: Bb add 2, Gm add 2, Bb add 2, Gm add 2, Eb add 2, F add 2, Gb7, Ab7. Rinse and repeat. If you'd prefer actual sheet music, keep an eye out on my community posts. I have some quickly written sheets up in my community tab: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoFyfka0nd8KuAmTfxZw-xw/community?lb=UgzzUg7wpHUfoBwA-s54AaABCQ
Now, how do you use this to warm up? Start off slow. Uncomfortably slow. We're talking 80 bpm, each note is a quarter note slow. Why start off this slow? Because it's going to make going faster a lot easier, and it's going to help your precision a lot. Take it from me, a lot of times even a pianist of many years has to take things slow first before they progress to the faster stuff. After you get the hang of it at a really slow speed, start to increase the speed. Not by a lot, just by a little each time. Soon, you'll have things up to speed, and it'll feel great.
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The video was made using Keysight.