Sleight of hand is all well and good, but is it really any better than using gimmicks or self working magic tricks?
Sleight of hand for the sake of it.
Magicians are addicted to learning new moves and techniques. However, practice of sleight of hand just for the sake of it can be a sure fire way to waste your valuable practice time. Recreational practice is not a problem in and of itself, unless that’s all you’re doing.
If you decide to commit your valuable practice time to mastering a move, make sure you also have an application for it. Being able to perform 20 different colour changes is no better than mastering a single method, that fits perfectly in the magic trick you want to perform. You only need to learn one method, until you have another magic trick or routine that actually requires a different technique. Don’t waste time building things that you don’t have a use for. Spend your time collecting complete magic tricks, not individual moves.
Unnatural moves.
Everyone loves to invent. Magicians especially love creating and modifying sleight of hand. A problem can occur when it’s done for no other reason than to publish and name something.
At the Merchant of Magic, it’s rare that a day goes by without the team receiving a video clip from a magician who has ‘created’ a new variation. Sometimes these variations are awesome, but mostly they are a traditional classic move with a layer of unnaturalness added.
The goal of sleight of hand isn’t to be unique or different, but rather to do something invisibly. Sleight of hand needs to look like ‘nothing at all’. Perfect technique strips away any movement and hand positioning, leaving only normal ‘everyday’ handling or action. If a sleight adds anything unnatural to your movement or hand position, it could be weakening the magic trick rather than improving it.
The busy fool principle.
Despite what we were all told at school, how hard you work, is sadly, not a direct indication of your likeliness to succeed. Hard work only leads to success if it’s focused in the right direction. This is done by creating and working towards clearly defined goals.
If we take earning a living from magic as an example, any magician can get a full diary of gigs if their fee is low enough. A magician can easily do 5 gigs every week for a fee of £50 each. That magician works really hard and feels successful as they have as much work as they can handle. However, another magician can have a larger income by charging £300 per gig, but only landing a single booking each week.
In just the same way, many truly obsessed magicians practice night and day learning moves and sleights, but have not set a goal to build a magic act. They work like a ‘busy fool’ building their knowledge without any goals to make the effort pay off for them.
The Emperors new clothes.
The Emperor: ‘The collar’s always around the neck, the sleeves always come off the shoulders, the waist always goes around the middle! When will they invent something original?‘ – The Emperor’s New Clothes 1987
So many moves are published that are nothing more than pipe dreams, invented by magicians who never actually perform them. The moves get attention from other magicians who also learn them, without any real intent to perform them either.
The inventor gets plenty praise, and the students congratulate each other on their skills mastering these obscure moves. There are countless online discussion groups built around discussing, reviewing and often arguing over these techniques, their originality and development. There are even online magic shops that specifically repackage this behaviour into a fashionable lifestyle culture.
It’s a fun pastime, sold as ‘training magicians’. In reality, it may not be doing that at all.
Technique over entertainment
Which would you rather watch?
OR
5 different uses for an Invisible deck?
Which would teach and entertain you most? I don’t actually need to write any more on this to get the point across, do I?
Practice vs. the average magician.
Let’s face it. Practicing magic is boring for most people. Some magicians love it, and the work itself is part of the reward and becomes a passion, but most people feel they have better things to do with their time than sit down and drill sleight of hand. The fun part is discovering a new trick, or discussing how a trick works. Most magic forums probably 99% discussion of new tricks, reviews, reverse engineering, marketing, and arguments about which trick is the best. You have to dig very deeply to find the 1% of useful discussion about practice and rehearsal.
We can moan about this as much as we like, but it’s simple maths:
The average magician is only prepared to spend an average amount of time working on their technique. This means that half of the remaining magicians are even less prepared to practice than them!
The result: A lot of terrible sleight of hand!
The Merchant of Magic was established as a magic shop to:
- Help people fall in love with magic.
- Guide beginners to practice.
- Help magicians design an act.
- Encourage magicians to perform.
If you have ever visited the shop, or called the team by phone, you’ll already know that the team often recommends the use of gimmicks over sleight of hand, for the majority of beginners. The sleight of hand guides and tutorials are also recommended by the shop, but the focus is on quality act creation, not an artificial ideal of purity in magic. After all, that’s how ‘he who must not be named’ would probably run a magic shop.
Using gimmicks doesn’t make you some kind of ‘mud blood’. In fact, it puts you in excellent company with magicians like David Copperfield, Dante, Devant, and Dia Vernon, and pretty much every other famous magician. The greatest magicians throughout history have always been partial to using gimmicks.
Come on Dominic, it’s not as simple as that.
Maybe. I’m definitely polarizing the issue to a large extent. Few magicians choose only sleight of hand, and refuse to use gimmicks. Most magicians study sleight of hand, and also buy self working tricks or gimmicks.
My point isn’t that you should choose to abandon sleight of hand, and fill your act with gimmicked props alone. You shouldn’t choose between sleight of hand or gimmicks at all.
I’m warning that it’s very easy to get wrapped up in ‘technique’ being sold to you as the path to being a fabulous magician. It’s hard to spot because it’s not being sold to you by magic dealers, it often comes from other magicians who are also caught up in the same trap of assuming competent sleight of hand defines the quality of a magician.
I recommend that you ignore advice based on the assumption that sleight of hand is always better. There are excellent techniques, and there are terrible techniques. In just the same way, there are amazing gimmicks, and dreadful gimmicks. Forget about the method of a trick you are thinking about learning. Look at the effect, the presentation, and what actually happens from the point of view of the spectator. If those elements are awesome, then you should learn it, regardless of the mechanics involved.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments section below:
Fantastic post, as a beginner I believed that magic was all about becoming the best sleight of hand artist and as a result you become a great magician. Instead, I now see that the method doesn’t actually matter as long as it is invisible, what’s important is the effect (in my case mind reader!). Thanks Dominic!
You’re welcome. There are many ‘rabbit holes’ that can eat up all your practice time, so making sure you pick material that you will REALLY use, is so important.
Keep up the good work!
Dominic
I take issue over the word "partial". Look at the "Stars of Magic" collection and count the number of items Vernon contrubuted that employ a gaff. Out of sixteen, including three from Leipzig's repertiore and three from Malini's, only one uses a gaff – "Leipzig's Pride" (also known as "Cap and Pence", "Stack of Coins" or somesuch). This and Allerton's "Bamboozle" are the only items of the thirty-six to use gaffs.
On the other hand, take a look at chapter 2 of Hay's Amateur Magician's Handbook, "Hard Easy Tricks and Easy Hard Tricks". He argues that using gimmickry as a shortcut to accomplish an effect will tempt you to skimp on presentation as well.
The real issue is "How does it look?" A gaff is a good solution if an effect cannot be accomplished as "magically" employing sleight of hand. As an example, consider McDonald's Aces (really Hofzinser's, but what can one do). I have worked a very long time at a sleight-of-hand assembly of which I'm quite proud, but the vanishes of the aces won't look as magical as they will using the gaffs. The advantage of pure sleight-of-hand methods is that they can be done with a borrowed deck and the cards are examinable.
I would advise the beginner to learn some (high-quality) "self-working" card tricks along with some simple sleight-of-hand tricks, such as "Two In the Hand, One In the Pocket".
Terrible advice. Skipping all sleight of hand at the start simply handicaps the beginner down the road. I'm not saying that the beginner should start tackling the classic pass or the Downs Coin Star, but spending some quality time with a simple false transfer or two can do wonders for teaching timing, simulation, and other invaluable skills for the time when more ambitious feats are wanted.
Great advice Chris. Thanks for posting this.
I agree, a beginer should start with one or two simple core utility sleights in their initial training, but I wouldn’t recommend too much focus is given to it at the start.
I find it’s a ‘balancing act’. Building a performing style and confidence perfroming is just as important to the MoM trainers, when developing the courses and training programs, so we start beginners off with some self working magic so they get to work on their presentation and style before spending many hours drilling moves.
When we started taking on students ( wow.. over a decade ago!) we build the course to cover indepth sleight of hand right from the start. The drop out rate was much much higher.that today. We found that giving beginners a short ‘set’ of self working magic’ for them to start rehearsing performance as soon as possible, dramatically improved the commitment rates amongst the students. As we introduce new material to this act, they begin to build in sleights at their own pace.
Thanks Dominic. I always look forward to your emails.
I agree with what you are saying and have a mixture of "sleight" and "gimmick" in my act.
There are a couple of points that I would like to make;
First, you mentioned something about "Pheonix" in an earlier post – you implied that hand size could be an issue. I find this fascinating. That the physical attributes of the performer could mean that they would be better off with this trick or that trick. It is odd that this had never struck me before. I always knew that people with long fingers are better than me on the piano. Seventeen stone, six foot four people are better than I will ever be at rugby and so on. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.
Secondly, your ideas about "patter" would help me. A trick/joke/effect can be saved or improved by the right word or comment at the right time. Yet I have never heard of any book or advice about gaining this skill. Here's an example; I was performing a card trick to a punter sat opposite me at a pub table. As I shuffled I screwed up and dropped a few cards at my feet. I bent down to pick them up which brought my ear to the table top. "What are you doing?" he asked. "I am listening to the wood" I answered. "Oh, yes different woods have different sounds". Honest to God, Dominic, he put his head on the table to listen to the wood. A ruined card trick had become the funniest thing anyone there had seen. I will market it as"The Woody Trick" It comes with a pub table and an idiot. Mind, only 400 idiots left. I don't have the warehouse space…
Malcolm
Maybe I can add something to this debate as a relative 'newbie'.
A bit of back story – I'm 46 yrs old, interested in magic forever but as a spectator, not performer, nor did I ever think I would become one, as it was all totally beyond me. I've hidden sweets from friends kids and pulled them out of their ears and I've sliced carrots into thin strips and put them unnoticed into goldfish tanks and pulled the 'fish' out still flapping and wriggling and eaten them, much to everyone's dismay and horror but that was it. Until 7 years ago, when on a trip to Disneyland I happenned along to a magic store in downtown Disney and was easily persuaded to part with $60 (£30 at the time) for a 'bag of magic'.
Took the magic bag back to our rented villa and started to explore when finally I was left alone by my children. Contents of the bag were, two decks of cards that I can't remember the correct terms for (a stripper deck and a deck where every other card was the same card and was slightly shorter in length), a thumb tip and small silk scarf, booklets on how to use each deck and the thumb tip, chinese pom pom sticks and a nice set of cups and balls (there may have abeen small other things but I can't recall).
The point of the story is about magicians using gimmicks or not and moreover whether beginners should use gimmicks or not. Well within 24 hours I had mastered the disappearing handkerchief and my kids and friends loved it. they got me to show everybody on the plane on the way home and it was cool. Without gimmicks, I wouldn't have had that 'quick win' and realised how interested other people were in such a .simple' illusion. I played once or twice with the magician's decks of cards of cards but didn't feel comfortable using them in public. It felt 'wrong'. Somehow making the hankie disappear and fooling people was allowed as most people don't carry a silk handkerchief and your hands are clean afterwards and can be inspected. These card sets however, were not performing real card miracles and could not be inspected, I wasn't really lying to the audience about fooling them (that was to be expected), I was actually lying to myself that I could do card magic and that's what I didn't like.
I perservered with the cups and balls and got some good reactions but as my audience was limited to family and friends then all tricks only had a finite 'showing' time before my audience numbers were exhausted. I found out about the two magic stores in London and paid the one a visit. much impressed with the wondrous displays and 'magical' select feel about it. The assistants were helpful, friendly and really welcoming (the same as when I visited the other shop or have spoken to stores online), which was great as I'm not usually the most outspoken person with new people who are experts in the field in which I am a novice. They showed me a few 'off the shelf' tricks, gimmick laden and 'easy to use' and I thought that was what 'real' magicians used 'trusting soul' that I am. And not knowing any other magicians and social media and internet selling not really big at the time, I had no real way of finding out what other magicians did.
So I went home with my purchases and played around and ultimately they were no good for more than a couple of performances, as again, I had learnt NO real skill. Each time I went to either store, they were intent on helping me and selling me exactly what I was after. Only for me to get home and realise what I had actually wasn't what I was after. I felt like someone who was learning to drive a car and not knowing how but the driving instructor asking me what it was about learning a car that I wanted to know, then charging me £20 for the hour to teach me just that but at the end of the hour not being any further towards passing my test.
So after a few visits and one good DVD that came with all the props that actually taught me a few skills and probably £200 later, I turned to the newly emerging internet and found Ellusionist. I bought two street magic dvd's and 4 card dvd's plus cards and rubbish acessories all sold to me via the hype of cool write ups and imagery. I never expected to be any good at card magic as all I had ever done was shuffle cards same as any lay person and knew it would take years of practice.
I had also bought a lecture video from the London store by Johnny Thompson for £1 but the Triumph and Travellers contained within were far beyond my skill level but did look so cool though. The DVD's from Ellsuionist in San Francisco were ordered at 4pm Friday and were waiting in Stansted airport at midnight the following day to be delivered at 9am on Monday morning. Within 24 hrs I was doing simple street stuff, within a fortnight I would have perfected the frst moves and start working on the second and would perform for a wider audience than I was used to and all the reactions were great. The simple step by step cards had me though. I was actually learning magic but it had taken me a good year or so to get to this point, as Chris said, and I paraphrase, "not learning the basic sleights at the beginning will hinder the learning further down the road".
I ran my own business so it took me another year of trial and error and showing friends and family before I knew what I could do or what kind of direction I wanted to go in but I always knew that I wanted to emulate Johnny Thompson and perform Triumph and Travellers. So I had my goal in mind and to cut a long story short but not as short as some would like 😉 This year I decided to turn pro and get paid for gigs, it's not been easy but I'm geting there and the self promotion is another thing to learn. However, I have had gigs the last two Sundays a 16th and a 60th birthday party. For both, I took some business cards, some elastic bands, a sealed pack of cards, 2 birthday cards that had been through the mailing system and had been date stamped, two duplicate cards (Wayne Houchin's french kiss), a double facer ( Doc Eason/Christopher Carter's Anniversary Waltz) and some sharpies. I performed for two hours each Sunday and have comments such as "thank you for bringing magic back to life" and " we have seen magicians but none of your calibre".
In summing up whether one uses gimmicks or doesn't use gimmicks, it is about whether one 'feels' like a magicician, whether one 'feels' that what they are doing is magical. If they do not, then all their spectators will ever see is a slick person doing trick after trick after trick with maybe a lot of needless talking going on. If a magician feels like a magician he will see what he is doing from the spectators point of view and to make as much as possible seem fair and as much as possible to seem magical. I can now perform the Triumph and the Travellers exactly as Johnny Thompson teaches it (though I will never be as smooth) and both get gasps and spontaneous rounds of applause.
Basic skill means you can perform at any time with any deck of cards/coins etc if someone asks. Gimmicks means that no magic will be performed today if I have the wrong jacket on. Yes I have bought a fair amount of gimmicks in my early days, then I learnt magic the way I wanted to learn and re-evaluated gimmicks and I have recently bought some more to change my act from just cards because I have a clear understanding of where I am and where I want to go. Who knows what is right for each performer or learner but selling beginners totally gimmicks to begin with is a cop out and could be seen as a money making exercise as they will be back for more in a short space of time (possibly) but then again selling them purely card/coin related moves and sleights and tricks would deaden their initial enthusisam as they realise that it will be several weeks or months before thay master one of the several moves needed to perform an illusion and you could possibly and needlessly lose these people to magic very early.
In my opinion if advice is asked for the honest advice should be given. Therefore, have a few gimmicks to get you started and see if you like it and if you do then we reccommend you buy this DVD and a couple of packs of cards or coins or rope and learn the moves that will last you a lifetime. Having said all that – Don't stage magicians ONLY use gimmicks? as the great David Copperfield once said "It's all about the performance".
I agree, its all about the performance and the result for the Spectators, we are Entertainers after all. What seperates the great from the good is presentation and performance, not technical ability.I also find that the fairer the effect, the more mystified the audience. Often Complex effects requiring a lot of Sleight of Hand are not as clean and fair as effects using Gimmicks.
For me its all about the effect, I will use Sleight of Hand if the effect warrants this, however I don't use Sleight of Hand for the sake of using Sleight of Hand. I also think that some effects are too complicated in their method or introduce knuckle busting moves for the sake of it.
As Dominic says, its all about learning Sleight of Hand in the Context of an Effect, Pick an Effect first and then learn the method and moves, then practice these, then work on the Presentation until it is smooth.
I think it should also be driven from circumstance, e.g. What do you do if someone shoves a deck of cards into your hands and says, "I hear you are a Magician, show me something". Then you need to have one or two impromptu effects ready that require some sleight of Hand. (By the way I can recommend Cameron Francis Ultimate Impromptu Card Magic – from Merchant of Magic). There are effects on this DVD suitable for all levels – beginner, intermediate and advanced and these will give you a good introduction to basic sleight of hand in the context of some very strong reputation making impromptu card effects.
Something to think about, I know several busy Professional Magicians who don't use any Sleight of Hand, as the effects and Routines that they Perform in their Acts don't require it.
Dominic Reyes' essay "Why Sleight of Hand Isn't Always Best for Magicians" is very thought provoking and the many comments are interesting. But, the really important question is why are there so many really terrible magicians? The reason is that most of these guys (and most are men) are really, really lazy. They spend tons of money on magic junk and never become even mediocre entertainers.
Why is this so? There are many reasons. First, most of them have no theatre training, no experience in front of an audience and no knowledge of the rudiments of comedy. So what the heck does it matter whether they use pure sleight of hand or gimmicks? They still stink!
A fair amount of sleight of hand skill is essential. You have to know your chops. How could someone play the saxaphone or guitar unless they know the basics. The same is true of magic. You have to know the core skills and this includes sleight of hand.
But I am not talking about all those clowns who have fifteen ways to put a ball under a cup, but have never broken down what makes the cups and balls, or ball and cone, or chop cup an effective routine.
You have to have skill and this includes audience management, how to move on stage, how to enter and exit and a host of other skills. Buying some gimmick that makes a card flip over on top of the pack does not make you a magician or an entertainer.
Magic would be better of if ninety five percent of these wanabees and fools never, ever performed again in their lives. Who are these idiots to think they can entertain and mystify an closeup or stage audience when they don't have a clue how to practice their craft – with or without sleight of hand or gimmicks!
Well this is an old post butI will comment anyway.
I started performing for friends when I was 8 with mostly simple tricks with no slights or simple ones. I was drawn to ‘gimmicks ‘ but learned to evaluate the method after I went to Lou Tannen’s in New York City.
I wanted to buy a gimmick to produce cards from my hand.
Lou told me I would be better off buying Card Magic byManipulation. He convinced me that learning the slight was better than needing a gimmick and 60 years later I can still produce cards from the air without needing anything but cards.
That said I have always felt the end result was better than the method.
I did a show in the Army and realized that my table was above eye level for the entire audience so I did my threaded razor blades by just leaving the unthreaded blades an the table. No special stand no slight of hand just miming