When will YOU be ready to start being a professional magician?
James asked MoM:
‘I have turned down about 30 odd gigs because I don’t feel I am ready for close up. When I go for it, I want to be perfect.What would you say is an adequate menu of magic tricks for professional magicians? What do you include? Obviously I do not intend to rip off anyone’s act. I just want to get an idea of what sort of standard is expected’
Dominic Reyes: That’s a great question James. I’m really surprised you have turned down 30 gigs because you don’t feel you are ready to be a professional magician. If your getting requests to do gigs, it sounds like you are impressing people with the magic you are doing and would like to hire you as a professional magician. It’s just that you don’t feel you are ready. The truth James is that you will NEVER get to the point when you feel 100% ready. It just doesn’t work like that for most people.
You can keep practicing for years, tweaking your act and magic tricks. Perhaps, only showing your close up magic tricks to family and friends, or you can take the leap that all professional magicians must take, and try out doing a proper gig. You have to draw a line on your practice at some point, and give it a go. It’s a scary decision, and one that is very easy to put off, but you have to do it sooner or later if you ever want to perform as one of the professional magicians
To make it less scary, agree to do a gig that’s a long way off. That will feel like you have given yourself time to really work on act construction, before the ‘big day’. You probably still won’t feel ready when the date arrives, that’s totally natural, but by then it’s too late to back out. Once you do the gig, I’m sure you will be kicking yourself for not doing a gig sooner.
I’ll pass you over to Ben Williams to discuss act construction:
Ben Williams: The magic of professional magicians should be direct and easy to understand, long phased magic tricks are not great, not everyone loves magic or wishes to sit through a long process.
Your magic tricks should reset very quickly or be automatically reset through the performance.
Make it fun, if you have fun with people half the battle is over.
If you are performing magic tricks at tables you need to be able top present the magic to EVERYONE, it is no good doing something small and close up that the whole table can’t enjoy as one.
Here are a list of great magic that professional magicians could do:
Professional magicians Walk-around Close Up Magic Tricks:
- Coins across
- Ambitious Card
- 3 Card Monte
- Card to Pocket
- One Coin Routine (finishing with a jumbo coin)
- Crazy Man’s Handcuffs
Professional magicians Table Magic Tricks:
- Bill Switch
- Any rope routine (Fiber Optics by Richard Sanders is my favourite)
- Ring Flight
- Card to Wallet
Read some advice on pocket management and performing magic tricks for money for other tips and points that will help.
[…] Marco asks: ‘How long do you need to practice magic tricks to become a professional magician?‘ […]