In my experience, warming up for smaller gigs can prove challenging especially since there’s usually no dressing room. I normally like to use the sound check to get comfortable on stage, and warm up with a couple of songs.
Below I’ve listed some of the approaches that a few well known guitar players take to warming up. Let us know what your personal routine is in the comments section below!
Paul Gilbert (Mr. Big)
I have to spend some time warming up backstage, and warm up my voice too. Mr. Big has a lot of singing as well as guitar playing.
Tommy Emmanuel
When I pick up the guitar I tend to play tunes at a medium tempo, then maybe practice some harder things. But the guitar is always with me, so I don’t tend to need a warm-up type of thing – only if I really feel like it. If I’m feeling a little stiff in the hands, I’ll pick some tunes, and play some scales or chromatic exercises, backwards and forwards. But mostly, the thing that gets me going the best, is playing a couple of tunes that you would play on stage, then sing a song or a couple of songs, and get that creative side woken up. Get that adrenaline in your blood, long before you go on stage. I kind of get into stage mode before I go out there.
Mick Thomson (Slipknot)
I like to run scales on bass, and then play guitar. It strengthens your hands, and it’s a great warm up before shows. It’s like running with ankle weights, and then taking them off.
Mark Tremonti (Creed, Alter Bridge)
Usually I use a Johnson Millennium JM150 stereo combo modeling amp. If I have a smaller show and need to carry a smaller amp, I’ll take a Micro Cube out or whatever is sitting around. Or I use the Pandora’s Box – something you can carry on the bus. Just whatever you can get your hands on that’s pretty light and easy to travel with.
Joe Bonamassa
When I was in my 20’s, I never had to warm up. I could just get on stage and everything was set to default. As I’ve kind of aged a bit, I find that I have to warm up. I tend to have a guitar in the dress room. I kind of do like a lot of bendy bits when I warm up, and try and get everything loose and flowing. And then, like, some big stretchy chords. That’s kind of my routine. When you hit the ground running you can tell you’re playing a little sloppy today. We’re 3 weeks into the tour and my hands are beat up and scarred, but I play hard. When you go out there for the first note, it’s important to set a good tone. You know, literally and figuratively. The first 3 songs are critical for setting that, kind of, wave of inertia. So you want to hit the ground running. When I warm up it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense musically, but it just kind of gets the hands going.
Gary Moore
I practice scales when I’m warming up before a show but people don’t want to hear you practicing scales in a performance. I’m out there to play exciting guitar and that’s all I want to do.
Joe Satriani
I run through a bunch of simple exercises, but I don’t go too crazy. I don’t really like to plug into any amp or headphones. I just like to hang out with the guys and just lightly warm up. I’ve found that playing during the day is a better thing for me, rather than spending an hour right before the show and shredding. I really do like to save it for the show. I like the idea of walking onstage and feeling like its a bit intense. You feel like you have to figure out what to do with all this energy flowing through your veins. The first song is always pretty intense. I’m not always feeling like I’ve got control over any finesse yet. It’s like playing with a big fist, and then eventually, I calm down somewhere around the third song. But that’s part of the experience that I really like.
Paul Waggoner (Between the Buried and Me)
Usually if I’m just doing my little warm-ups, I do it without an amp. You can really tell if you’re playing well without an amp because there’s nothing there to mask poor technique. When you’re playing through an amp, especially with distortion on, there’s a lot more margin for error. I force myself to play without an amp just so I can focus on the nuances – you know, pick attack and stuff like that. You can hear if a note buzzes and say, “Oh man, I’m not hitting that as cleanly as I should.”
