What are some things you should do as a warm-up for guitar?

Hey everyone! So today, I’m going to share with you all some things that I do for a warm-up for the guitar. 

Before we get into it, let’s have our moment of silence. 

At this time, I would like all of us to take a moment of silence and pray to God to help us to become the person that he wants us to become. Ask God to guide us musically and become the musician that he wants us to become. Take a minimum of 5 minutes and pray for this. 

Now back to the show

What are some things that you do as a warm-up for the guitar

So as a guitarist, you really have different things that you should be doing as a warm-up depending on what stage you are in, in your guitar career. 

If you’re starting out, doing rudiments such as playing with all your fingers is something that you NEED to be doing. 

Developing all of your fingers accordingly is absolutely critical to becoming an excellent guitar player. 

As a guitar player, one of your biggest weaknesses is almost always going to be developing your pinky because as a guitar player, we will often ignore the pinky because we view the pinky as an accessory and we use it only when it’s time to use it not as an essential tool to our guitar player kit. 

When in reality, our pink is just as important as any other finger that we develop. 

Another thing that we always need to be improving on is our rhythm and chord selection. 

As guitarists, we are in charge of adding rhythm to a track. Adding that rhythm gives the song a dynamic and a change that empowers the song to move forward. 

Therefore we need to be practicing chords and rhythm. ALL sorts of rhythm. 

What happens is that us as guitarists will often choose to stick to one basic rhythm or a variety of it. 

And that’s the down- down -doooown-down-up-up-down. 

Or it will be some sort of variety of that. 

However, we should be able to create our own sorts of rhythm and develop our own sense and feel so that our songs come out strong and rhythmic. 

So without further ado. Here are some warm-ups for every type of guitar player.

The beginner warm-ups

The beginner needs to focus on all sorts of playing. 

Anything that you do could be considered a warm-up

From playing twinkle twinkle little star to just practicing some rudiments for the guitar, it’s all a warm-up. If it were me, I would pick a song that I would like to learn, master it, and then use that as my warm-up for the rest of my songs. 

I just wouldn’t recommend using an insanely hard song as your warm-up

I know some of you prodigies out there are probably playing Crazy Train by Ozzy Osbourne as your beginner song, but slow it down a little bit because it takes a lot of effort to actually play that song. 

Practice transitioning between chords by literally just moving your fingers in the direction and position of the chords that you’re supposed to be in. 

Practice playing basic chords and strum patterns so that you start strengthening your hands to take on the roles of being a guitar player. 

Believe it or not, a whole lot of rock songs are basic chord progressions, so make sure that you master the basics in chords. 

And always practice with a metronome. It’s something that I didn’t do for a huge portion of my beginner guitar days, which set me back some. 

I eventually started playing with a metronome and yes it does help. You are in rhythm and on beat more with the metronome. 

Intermediate guitar player

When you’re an intermediate player, you are still kind of figuring things out. However, now it’s time to really amp things up a bit. 

Before you might’ve been playing the guitar for half an hour, maybe an hour at most. 

Now, you have to dedicate more hours into playing the guitar. 

I don’t care what other people say about playing the guitar. 

You need to put in the hours into the guitar to become a really good guitarist. There is no other way around it. 

So maybe put in around 2 or maybe 2 ½ hours of guitar into your practice everyday if not most days. 

I would say practicing the guitar 6 or 7 days a week because that’s how much work is needed to stay strong in the guitar. 

At this point in time, you would need to practice scales and advanced chords.

Maybe start implementing barre chords into your chord practicing routine. 

You will run into barre chords as a guitarist, so always practice them. 

And then also, you need to develop your speed. 

At this point in time, if you were to pick a moderately fast song that has a fast solo, I think that would be good enough to get your speed up.

Of course, don’t limit yourself to just that. If you really feel so inclined to play and start learning those ridiculously fast songs, then start. I’m not stopping you. 

Advanced guitar player

At this point in time, you should be practicing a whole bunch almost every day. 

At this point in time, you should be practicing between 4 and 8 hours a day. You should already be playing fast solos, your scale vocabulary has increased by a bunch. And you’ve also gotten into voicings. 

Voicings are a jazz thing. Where you play a chord but only like three or four notes in the chord. Sometimes they could be really difficult chord selections which is why the sheet music gives you the chord to play. 

They are used in metal and punk, and all forms of music really, but they originated in jazz. 

A word of advice

Now you might be wondering to yourself, “German, there are so many styles of guitar out there, how am I supposed to learn it all?”

Well that’s a good question and to that the answer is, you don’t. 

What happens is that people spend their lives mastering a certain style of guitar that it’s just not possible to learn them all. 

There was an interview with Slash who was named as Guitar World’s best guitarist for 7 years.

He of course is a metal guitarist.

And Slash said that he once had a few recording sessions with Ray Charles who is a Jazz musician. 

And he said that he could not do Jazz because of all the chord changes! 

However, I’m pretty sure that if you were to put Ray Charles’ guitarist against Slash in a metal competition, he would lose by far.

So like, it really depends on what you’re trying to sound like. 

I personally loved the speed of metal and punk and rock was. 

It was fast and moveable. 

However, Jazz and classical just sounds too technical. 

Anyways, that’s just my opinion on it. 

Go after the sound that you want, and you could never go wrong. 

Broadcast

I sure hope that I have been an inspiration and a hope to you all. Please remember to pray, read your bible, go to church, and love God above all else. Like, comment, share, subscribe, and I will see you all next time.

If you want to go to heaven, then believe in Jesus and you will go to heaven. (John 3:16)

Thank you all for listening in on this blog post. 

German Gonzalez, signing out!