How to do Magic Tricks

Advice and Support for Magicians

Fix Magic Tricks You Don’t Use – Problems with Close Up Magic Tricks

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Fixing Magic Tricks You Don't Like

What do you do with close up magic tricks you don’t use? You thought they would be ideal for you, but they turned out not to be suitable…

 

 

 

It could be any number of reasons including:

  • The technique was too hard, and put you off learning
  • The set up was more than you are prepared to do
  • The magic trick doesn’t suit your persona, pace or style
  • The conditions required for the magic tricks don’t fit with your location

Hitting a dead end with some of your new close up magic tricks, shouldn’t mean that they just get added to the ‘magic trick grave yard’ pile every magician has.

There is no reason that a magic trick has to be performed exactly as the creator of the magic trick designed it to be done. Every magic trick you order is unfinished because it’s missing a huge part: YOU

Use creativity.

If something doesn’t feel right, or the trick doesn’t seem to fit you as a magician, change it!

 
Mathieu Bich Talks About Developing Your Magic Tricks Through Creativity

Use your creativity to bring your own knowledge, experience and technique to the method. Adapt the handling, change the patter, evolve the gimmicks that come as standard with all your close up magic tricks.

How magic shops can help

Good magic shops will give you further support after the point that you have received the magic tricks you order from them:

  • Talk to the support team to get further ideas.
  • Visit the magic shop and bring the magic tricks along, so the magicians can give you more ideas and watch your performance.
  • Film a video clip of you performing the trick and send a link to the magic shop for them to give you tips on your performance.

How other magicians can help.

Seek out feedback from other magicians. If you belong to a magic club, show the other members your new trick and ask for feedback. You never know when a small tip, will change the whole impact of the magic tricks you perform.

RELATED: How to Be a Magician At School

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How to Set the Pace of Magic Tricks – How to Relax and Slow Down

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Pace of Magic tricksDo you struggle to set a consistent speed and pace when performing your magic tricks? It all seems to go well in private, but as soon as you perform in front of people, you tend to speed up and rush through the magic trick. That’s a very common problem magicians face, and it’s easy to fix.

When you practice your magic tricks, you are performing to yourself. You run through the trick at the speed that feels right for you. However, that can often be close to your thinking speed. A persons inner dialog or voice is much faster than they naturally talk. Unless you take this into account when you reach the rehearsal stage of your practice, you may find that you perform your magic tricks to fast.

 

Testing out your practice and performing pace.

Magicians don’t suffer from this alone. Comedians, MC’s and professional speakers all have to train themselves to present their ‘act’ at a slower pace than feels natural to them.

A great way to see this in action is to take part in a small magic competition or open mic night for magicians. In these situations, you will often have a time limit. The ‘act’ that you put together will run perfectly during private practice, but you will be shocked at how time changes when you are on stage. Many magicians run through their material at such a pace that they end up having to improvise more material at the end, then lose their timing and get a red light for ‘going over time’.

 

 

Slowing down your magic tricks.

Once you have practiced the mechanics of a magic trick, it’s important that you take the time to rehearse the full performance in natural time. Saying the full magic script out loud and building in natural pauses and breaks in the patter.

Run through the full presentation at half the speed that feels natural to you. That’s probably close to the speed that you should perform at in public, to sound natural and relaxed.

The old saying in magic is that the hand is quicker than the eye. This is, in itself, a trick. In reality speed makes people suspicious. The best sleight of hand is performed slowly and NATURALLY, and that’s just the same with your patter. Talking and moving fast suggests nervousness. Smooth, graceful, easy actions look more professional, and it’s just the same with your speech.

Do this: Invest in a metronome. Perform your favourite magic trick and time it. Now set the metronome to a pace that is half the speed. Practice running at this slower speed. It will feel very unnatural at first but will soon become second nature.

When you perform for the public, take a moment to stop. Just breathe and relax your body, now continue at at half speed and notice how much easier it all feels. Your spectators will relax as well, and they will appreciate your magic tricks more, and you will get a big improvement in the feedback from them.

 

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Learn Magic Tricks with Context and Meaning – Advice from Garrett Thomas

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Garrett Thomas - Learn magic tricks that reflect your personality

How do we learn magic tricks that have a context and meaning that relates to us as individual magicians?

Ask yourself: what do you love to do? Not just in the sense of magic, but in general. What are your hobbies? What gets you excited and motivated?

We asked master magician Garrett Thomas to take a few moments to give you some advice on this subject:

 


It’s common advice to build your character and persona around your own personality, rather than being a clone of other magicians. However, to do this you need to understand exactly who you are. The old saying goes: ‘You are what you do’.

What else do YOU do?

Draw inspiration when you learn magic tricks, from your passions. If, like Garrett Thomas, you enjoy puzzles, how could you build that into the exaggerated version of yourself that you present as your magic persona?

Ok, I know, your first love is magic.. But what else do you love? The best magic you create in your life will be inspired by what you pull out of yourself, your own interests and personality.  Perhaps you love gambling? If you have a passion for that, outside of magic, then it would be a good fit, for you to learn magic tricks that fit that theme.

Maybe you love reading books on a specific theme? Could you choose magic tricks to create an ‘act’ that reflects and communicate that passion?

Paint by Numbers.

Garrett Thomas suggests that you should look at the magic tricks created by other magicians as a form of ‘paint by numbers’. As we search a magic shop for new magic tricks to learn, it’s easy to forget that we are looking at the collective work of thousands of different magicians. Each of the magic tricks is offered OUT OF CONTEXT from the magicians complete act.

Looking at magic tricks in isolation from their context, does not give us a common theme for the tricks to be presented. The result: We tend to pick magic tricks simply because each magic trick fools us, and we feel we could also use them. We don’t consider if they fit our own consistent theme or personality. It’s very important to think about how any new magic tricks will fit in with the tricks that will also be presented in the set or act you perform. When fitted together will they present a common message about you as a performer, or just be a random series of ‘cool’ magic tricks any magician could do.

The way to stop being interchangeable.

Most magicians are interchangeable. It’s a sad fact that magic entertainment agencies will hire out magicians as an ‘out the box’ product.

Magic Agency: 

 ‘You need some table magicians? No problem! I can supply 3 table magicians for the event, and you get a discount!’


That’s not how YOU want to be sold to a client. You want to be hand picked and a feature of the event. Generic magic tricks make generic magicians. The way to prevent being generic is to have a unique feature. The best unique feature is your personality, communicated to the audience through the act and the magic tricks that form it. THAT is the reason why you should think about context when you choose to learn new magic tricks.

 

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