Warm Up Guide for Double Bassists

This lesson is taken from our course 'Practiceology' by Lauren Pierce. Learn how to create your perfect practice routine.  


A good warm up routine is essential if you want to play in comfort and avoid injury. In this video Lauren Pierce recommend how you should warm up and shares her routine. 

Worksheets are provided below the video. 

My Warm Up:

  • Tune/long tones on open strings (2-3 mins)

  • Slow scale (10 mins)

  • Shifting Drill (2-3 mins)

  • 4-note progressive scale or Shiftless Scales in Thumb Position (5 mins)

Key Elements of a Good Warm Up:

  • Tuning/Simple movements

  • Scales/Arpeggios

  • Shifting/Intonation Work

  • Exercise/excerpt practicing both left hand & right hand velocity

Activity/Worksheet:
Use the worksheet for this lesson and the ideas you wrote down for each area in the last lesson to brainstorm a warm up for yourself. You can also use some of the resources from lesson 5 in the last section to come up with ideas.

Come up with 3 different warm ups with all drastically different exercises.

Bonus: Make each warm up a different length of time (i.e. 5 minutes, 15 minutes, and 25 minutes). Doing this prevents you from skipping your warmup because you don’t have enough time.


We would love to hear what warm up exercises have worked for you.  Please join the conversation in the comments section and let us know.