Part 2 of the cleaned up transcript of the MoM Podcast episode 1. Three magicians sat in a magic shop talking about practicing their magic tricks. This section is about magicians bad habits.
Pauls Bad Habit:
Paul Knight One of my bad habits is when I’m learning or practicing routines or tricks, whatever you wish to call it, I start making my own patter as I’m learning it. I should really learn the trick first then revisit it and try and figure out a patter and there’s not much advice out there on patter.
Dominic Reyes It’s tricky because you don’t want to just practice in silence because you’re not going to perform in silence. So using the voice acts as a cue to the moves. Especially later, if you practice over a long period and then try and show it to someone you find you hesitate and you pause and you freeze, generally it tends to be the fact that you’ve been practicing in silence.
Paul Knight You’ve been practicing the moves and the mechanics of the magic trickstricks, but not actually the performance of the effect. Practicing the performance and learning about that is just as important really. If you want to be serious.
Ben Williams So how do you do that? How do you practice?
Paul Knight I actually speak out loud when I’m on my own practicing. Once I did set up three teddy bears around the table and practiced it on those. I was having a great conversation and the patter flowed, but the reaction wasn’t what I expected. [Laughter]
Dominic Reyes Really?
Paul Knight It was a tough gig. That helped though. This sounds really ridiculous, but it helped.
Ben Williams It was a fluff gig. {Laughter]
Paul Knight It gave me points to look at, places to look at when I was performing. Which gave me cues to what part in the routine am I?
Ben Williams Exactly, I was going to bring up the point of practicing in the mirror. Practicing in the mirror is very important for getting your angles right. But if you get too caught up in doing that you will find that you’re performing your routine and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror as you do it.
When you go to perform to a real person your eyes aren’t going to be looking at yourself in the mirror. They’re going to be looking at the spectator in front of you, oh, did that person to the right see something? And your mind is in totally different places and looking at different things too. So sometimes when I’ve practiced the magic tricks and I know that my angles are good and I understand them I’ll step away from the mirror and I’ll just practice walking about. Just walking up and down my hallways practicing my patter as well because it takes you away from getting locked down. If you’re only practicing in one condition then once you step away from that condition it’s a whole new ballgame.
Dominic Reyes I agree. When I was learning the retention of vision vanish for example. I would practice it and repeat and repeat and repeat in front of the mirror. But once I didn’t have that feedback, I had a problem. I became reliant on the feedback to see whether it looks okay. It was really uncomfortable to perform the move and I wouldn’t do it.
Paul Knight Feels like everyone’s seeing it.
Ben Williams Exactly! Because you’re not getting that feedback. You’re not getting that instant check that it looks good. You need to know that it looks good in the mirror, but then you also need to practice it in the mirror so you know it looks good when you’re just looking at your hands.
Paul Knight You have to be practiced in this sort of way, if you want to feel confident. Sometimes when you perform, a spectator might whisper to another spectator, it can give you a clue that they’re following what you’re doing. Now they may well be, but the likelihood is that they think they know what you’re doing but are totally wrong.
Dominic Reyes They’re following the method they think.
Ben Williams Yeah, they’re going somewhere completely wrong, but if you don’t have confidence in your own sleights, if you haven’t practiced them enough, you’re just going to believe they know exactly what’s going on. That will cause you to speed up. It can cause you to rush through things, not allow you to be as entertaining as you can be and also it will bring down the quality of your performance for everyone else. At the end of the day, if you can have nine people really enjoy it and have one person figure it out or have 10 people not really enjoy it, which would you prefer?
Paul Knight I’d politely disregard the people who think they know..
Ben Williams Even if they know how it’s done, you get that. You can’t go through life being a magician and honestly say you’ve never had someone figured anything out that you’ve done.
Paul Knight You would be fooling yourself.
Paul Knight I’d like to fool someone just once though. [laughter]
Ben William You’ve fooled yourself. [Laughter]
Dominic Reyes I once took a part-time job where I was in a showroom as a salesman and the whole place was surrounded by great big glass windows, so I’m staring at a reflection of myself all day.
Dominic Reyes Retention, Classic Pass etc etc all day long… I’m running a coin roll all day when I’m on the phone and I’m watching it and watching it and then people started asking me ‘why are you closing your eyes?’ when I performed the moves at a gig.
Paul Knight I was just about to mention that.
Dominic Reyes Well, I don’t want to see it when I do a funny movie. It’s only by videoing myself later on, that I picked up that tell and it’s taken quite a while to get rid of it.
Paul Knight It’s a reluctance to see bad magic, I don’t know, because I do it as well.
Dominic Reyes If I can’t see it, they can’t see it.
Ben Williams You don’t know you’re doing it.
Dominic Reyes I wouldn’t have spotted that at all, so another good habit in your practice time is to video yourself and that can be quite painful to watch.
Ben Williams If you can, and not everyone has the facilities to do this, but if you can set up more than one camera so that you have multiple angles, it’s not so bad because everyone’s got some sort of video camera on their phone or you could just borrow your friends’ phones or have someone video you. You could get a nice little bit of footage of your magic tricks, which you can use to learn from.
Dominic Reyes Don’t just film yourself. Don’t just set up a camera and film yourself performing magic tricks. You can look on YouTube and find thousands of people doing that and you won’t learn very much. It needs to be you performing to an audience. You need to see the feedback you get, you need to see how you come across to an audience.
Paul Knight Even your stance.
Ben Williams Your stance, your speed, is something that you might find yourself doing is shifting your weight left to right foot nervously and you won’t pick that up unless you’re actually videoing yourself at all.
What magicians bad habits do you have? Let us know in the comments section below
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