How Magicians Find Their Core Skills – Advice from Gary Jones

by Dominic Reyes 1 Comment

Dominic Reyes up with professional magician Gary Jones, and he took time out to record a short video about discovering your own core skills in magic.

Gary Jones makes a valuable point here. It's so easy to feel that we need to master every move in magic. This gets reinforced as we watch other magicians perform, especially if you watch a lot of magic DVD's. We see many magicians, each performing their own magic tricks with an expert ease. In truth, we are seeing each performers BEST material. The half practiced, off the mark, or near miss material never gets the spot light. As a result, it's easy for us to assume that each professional magician is a master of all the classic techniques, and we should be the same.

In reality, each person has different strengths and weaknesses. One performer may naturally have a talent for manipulation, another may excel at palming, a third may not have much dexterity, but they are highly empathic and express that though skilled communication. Although some magicians achieve perfection across everything they work on, most tend to find a few core moves of techniques that they find easy to use. Once they have this core set of skills, they adapt and develop magic tricks that use these advantages.

DO THIS:

Make a list of the techniques that you find easy to perform.

Look at your other magic tricks and think about how they coul be adapted to use the moves you already have mastered.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Use your existing strengths, adapt your material and make the most of what you already know.

What Does a Good Double Lift Look Like – How to do Card Magic Tricks

by Dominic Reyes Leave a Comment

Zoby writes:

What makes a good double lift, and how do I perform it?

That's a good question which has an annoying answer. The reason it's annoying is because the answer is different for each person.

Everyone develops their own style of technique, so each move performed should blend into your existing styleof card magic. If you tend to handle playing cards in a way that looks like you don't have any card skills (See the card magic of Lennart Green as an example of this), it will look very odd to suddenly perform a complex flourish as you turn a playing card over. Each move you perform should be invisible. Making every action look natural, and in keeping with all your previous actions with the playing cards, helps achieve this overall impression.

What to do:

Pick up a deck of cards and turn a single playing card over. Don't think about how you will turn the card over, just do it.

A good double lift should look EXACTLY like that.

Anything you add to the action, weakens your technique. Film yourself performing the simple action of turning over a playing card. You want to record your natural method, before you start playing with that action. Refer back to it as you learn the double lift. The closer you can get the sleight to resemble your natural action, the better your double lift will become.

How to learn the double lift:

If you are looking for expert tuition on a double lift, including a range of magic tricks that use the move as their core technique, these sources may be ideal for you:

Double Take By Gregory Wilson

Advanced Card Control Series

It's important that you choose a source of instruction that gives you some card magic tricks that use the double lift. Once you drill the technique in isolation, you need to be able to rehearse the move within the context of a full magic trick or routine, This will help you to develop the timing and flow of the move.

Learning Sleight of Hand Tricks – How to Add Structure to Your Practice

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

How do you start to learn sleight of hand tricks in a structured and focused way? That's a question that gets overlooked by many beginners as they race from magic trick to magic trick, soaking in as many new techniques as they can.

The key to focused practice is to choose a group of core techniques that you plan to work on, then create a structured practice schedule.

Let's look at the process:

Step 1: Choosing the technique

Start by creating a list of core moves that you would like to develop. This should be quite short, as each move will be the subject of a long period of focused work. Scale your list down to 5 or 6 key techniques that you REALLY want to master. For example:

The Double Lift
The Elmsley Count
The Cull
The Double Under Cut
The Classic Palm

These will be the foundation for your practice over the next 6 months of magic training.

Once you have a core list pick one of the techniques to start your training.

Step 2 : Creating a Timetable

Now we have selected a sleight, we can build an effective program to give structure and a pace to our training.

At this point, it's easy to rush in and start practicing every moment you can. For some people this works fine, but it can lead to 'burn out' from boredom or impatience to move on to something new. If you find that you struggle to commit to serious practice, and skip from technique to technique without mastering anything, you may find that a structured practice schedule will greatly help you.

We recommend daily practice, in short sessions.

10 minutes practice in the morning

10 minutes practice in the evening.

Choose the first technique that you will work on, and focus on only that move for the next 2 weeks. Drill the move SLOWLY for 10 minutes every morning and 10 minutes every evening. Practice slowly, just focusing on performing the move accuratly and smoothly.

Speed

Your practice should be SLOW. The goal is on perfect technique rather than speed. If you rush the moves, assuming that faster is better, you will be making small errors, which become reinforced by repetition.

Speed is a side effect of good technique, not part of the technique itself.

Why short practice sessions

This allows you time for consolidation of the information you have learned, and the muscle memory to become embedded.

British “memory champion” Ed Cooke ( who can memorise a full deck of playing cards in under 2 minutes) agree's that short practice sessions are more effective:
Learning in short bursts, testing yourself on the technique over several weeks, and making sure that there are sufficient intervals between each practice session.

"The best thing to do is break up your studying of a subject – 10 minutes, test yourself, then again on day two, then day seven and day 14. The biggest mistake you can make is just to keep practicing it over and over to yourself.”

Step 3: Assessment

After 2 weeks, video your performance of the technique and watch it back. Have a critical eye and make note of:

Mistakes in your technique.
Hesitation.
Unconciouse 'tells' that you might not have been aware of.
How the flow of your actions look natural.

If you are completely happy with the technique, you can now move on to put it in action. If not, repeat the drill program for another week.

Step 4: Application and rehearsal

Once a technique has been practiced, you can't rest there. You need to keep it fresh and familiar over time.

Any move you learn is a waste of time, if you don't have an application for it. You need a magic trick that you WANT to perform that uses the technique. As you start rehearsing the full trick, you also reinforce your performance of the techniques within it. This keeps your skills active over time. Repeat the practice drill for the WHOLE magic trick, repeating it a few times each day.

Once you are happy with your progress through rehearsal, you are ready to start again at step 1 with the next technique you wish to master.

This 4 step training makes up part of foundation process that The Merchant of Magic uses for personal tuition sessions. It's also part of the training system within The Sleight of Hand for Beginners 3 month course. The process aims to slow down the learning process, focus the student on a few core techniques and progress learning through a drill program. Once a techinique is mastered, it is set to work within the context of several magic tricks that use the move, giving the student a range of tricks, that entertain, and reinforce their new skills at the same time.