Technique: Cello warm-ups - the bow arm

Students often tell me that they warm up by playing scales, but they forget that the whole repertoire is made up of scales, from the Bach Suites to Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, the Chopin Sonata and the Haydn concertos! We need to warm up in order to play scales, so that we can really benefit from our practice and use our hands effectively to communicate our feelings through sound, with minimum effort. We can save a lot of time by warming up all aspects of our playing before we begin work on our pieces. In this article I focus on warm-ups for the right hand, but as outlined in my book (see box, page 81), I recommend alternating these with left-hand warm-ups, which I will discuss in next month’s Technique article…