The pleasures of fingerpicking with cold hands

One memory of graduate school that I have is me warming up for a half hour or so outside of Nick Goluses's office before my lesson. Classical guitar has a way of showing a person how cold their hands are at any given moment. It also makes it tougher to be ready for any sort of performance, or lesson. It never failed either. I never felt totally ready to do what I needed to do.

Fingerpicking somehow has the same effect. Currently, there are people taking lessons who are working hard to learn how to fingerpick. They come into their lesson and are usually upset that they aren't playing their best right off the bat. It's understandable. The hands can feel cold and clumsy, and just don't work quite as well as one would expect them to. It happens. But as soon as they are in here for about 15 minutes, then they start playing well. It's the warm up thing.

Warming up isn't supposed to be excessive. I know a guy who claimed he warmed up for six hours when he was getting his degree. I forgot to ask him when he practiced. The one thing that it does help with though is making cold hands far more warm and ready to play.