By Gerry Sorrentino

I feel warming-up is important. When you're on the road and touring, sometimes you don't even want to pick up your bass because you're playing every night. But warming-up, or should I say "getting in sync" with your instrument is very important. Night after night playing the same songs will put you in "patternville". You wind up on automatic pilot, just playing patterns and shapes on the fingerboard. This can become monotonous. Your muscle memory gets so used to playing these patterns that when you have to do something else that you have not done before, like throwing in a nice lick or a run you've never played before, it can cause you to sometimes fumble or get tripped up.

Fortunately I'm in a band that improvises a lot. So that really helps and keeps me on my toes. But what I'll do is go back to square one with my warm-ups. Basically it's just taking for instance a C major scale and running the modes from that scale up and down the fretboard. Start slowly with quarter-notes up and down each mode until you run it up an octave. Then go back down the neck. Then do eighth-notes on each note of the scale the same way. Ex. CC-DD-EE-FF etc. Then triplets. Ex. CCC-DDD-EEE-FFF etc. Then sixteenth-notes. All the while doing this with all the modes of that scale.

You can also do all the arpeggios of the modes the same way. Quarter-notes, eighth-notes etc. You can also run up the scales in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths etc. the same way. You don't have to do all of this in one sitting. You can do any of them anytime you want. The thing is to get your left and right hand in sync and giving all the digits of your fretting hand a workout.

It's all simple basic stuff, but the simple basic stuff never lets you down. It helps you to center yourself and ready you for what's coming. Kind of like a pitcher warming up in the bullpen and then getting on the mound and pulling out all the stops. I hope these simple but effective exercises will help.

All the best,
Gerry