9 Creative Warm-up Ideas for Concert Band

Concert band has a rich tradition of helping kids learn to read the staff. However, the skill of reading the staff, as important as it is in some contexts, can become a crutch for many school musicians. Of course, music teachers trained in the conservatory model often do not possess the skills to teach other skills like improvisation, composition, and ear learning due simply to their own school and university experiences. These skills, are not only required of modern musicians, they are are also a vital contributor to the lifelong learning landscape of non-professionals. In other words, the skills of improvising, ear learning, and composition will help folks to engage in music making outside of the school walls and later into life simply because they won't need sheet music to help them play--they will have more options to engage with music.

There are, however, ways in which teachers can implement creative activities in ways that seem both authentic and approachable.

Here are some creative warm-up ideas for concert band and activities I've used to help integrate creativity and ear learning into a warm-up. Inserting these into a warm-up is a relatively easy way to explore and introduce these skills, especially for educators unfamiliar with these traditions of music making:

1. Use a drum machine for scale practice. I've used GroovePizza and other drum machines to add a beat to our scale practice. They can create a rhythm for each pitch or play the scale as is to the beat. You could even have the kids come up with the drum groove.

   
   

2. Have students come up with the rhythms they do for the scale practice. Working on articulation? Have students come up with the rhythms for the scale pattern.

   
   

3. Have a jam session. I either play a chordal accompaniment on guitar or put on a jam track from YouTube in whatever key we are working in and have them all improvise at once. It sounds like chaos, but it gets them improvising without feeling like they are putting themselves out there. Ask for solos if you think they are ready. Do you really know a scale if you aren't improvising with it?

   
   

4. Use an improvisation game or two. Jeffrey Agrell wrote a series of books called "Improvisation Games for Classical Musicians." It has a ton of great games to get kids thinking outside of the box and playing their own music in an authentic way.

   
   

5. Have learners create a groove or riff and make a new piece of music based around it. All you need is a few notes repeated in a pattern. Then invite other learners to copy that pattern. Once that is established invite more to add their own part to it. Eventually you might have a composition that you can perform!

   
   

6. Use Soundpainting. Soundpainting is a system of gestures for conductors developed by Walter Thompson to communicate musical idea and facilitate improvising and composing. The gestures tell performers to play long tones, short tones, change pitch or anything the musicians can imagine together. Then, whatever the conductor gestures, the performers can improvise within those parameters. Take a look, here. Young band performers can learn a few gestures within a short time and can even begin to perform the gestures themselves in front of the band!

   
   

7. Have a theme day. This can be as simple as asking students to make their warm-upscale sound "spooky," or "sad," or "stormy." Anything goes. You will be shocked with what they come up with!

   
   

8. Use a familiar piece and open up a section for solos. Use a simple march or something else with a basic chord progression like in Cait Nishimura's "Bloom" and open up a section for solos. As long as they keep within the key and pick a few notes, they can't go wrong. Pentatonic scales are even better! After all, the jazz tradition of improvisation was developed from marches.

   
   

9. Learn a simple, familiar melody by ear in the key you are working in. If it's not familiar to everyone, be sure they hear it enough times until it is. Give them the first note of the song and let them go from there. Some will need more time than others. You could make it into a game by seeing how much of the melody they can get within 5 minutes. This will be more effective if you take a couple of minutes to learn it yourself beforehand.

What kinds of warm-ups do you do with your bands or orchestras to help their creativity shine? I would love to hear about them.

Until next time, Happy Musicking!