7 Things To Get Right When Starting Magic

Beginners starting magic training are often frustrated with the progress they make. Here’s 7 things that they need to fix right away

I work with a lot of magicians that come to me because they are frustrated with the progress they have made. It’s often because of some simple things that they should have started doing right at the beginning of their journey into magic. Here’s 7 things that I most often recommend:

Avoid the magic binge

I’m going to make an assumption about you… Your excitement about magic means that you practice for hours at a time in huge ‘all evening’ practice sessions. These tend to be unstructured with no set goal in mind. Does this sound familiar to you? The results tend to be disappointing as you either get ‘burned out’ and stop practicing for a while, decide you just don’t have enough time to commit to regular practice, or you get bored and jump for one trick to the next, so no real progress is made. These binge sessions slowly transform into browsing the internet for new tricks, watching magic DVD’s, reading books, or browsing the internet magic forums. That’s valuable research, but it’s not PRACTICE.

To fast track your progress, you need to have a structured program of practice you can do every day. Working on JUST ONE trick or technique at a time. Frequent short sessions are much better than long binges because of the way our brains process information.

Choose effects before moves

Studying just moves, controls, and sleights endlessly is like a painter, spending years learning how to perfectly mix the oil paints to every shade of colour… They end up with a huge palette of paints, but no paintings…. Choose tricks and effects FIRST, and then master the controls, moves and sleights you need in order to perform those tricks. Doing that will mean you improve your skills with a goal at the end.

Use an effective practice drill

The key to any skill is repetition. It’s the difference between a beginner and a master. You could argue that natural ability is also a factor, but I firmly believe that this only plays a very small part in what makes a magician technically perfect. Natural ability only determines the quantity of practice required to master the moves

The difference between a beginner and a master is usually just the number of times they have performed the task.

In my book Approaching Magic Practice, I recommend that magicians establish a regular drill to practice the moves and condition them as motor responses. In just the same way that you would learn the piano, it is the constant repetition which will make you a master of any move.

The 20 – 20 – 20 Drill Method

A professional practice drill would be to perform the complete trick 20 times in the morning and 20 times in the evening. Repeat this every day for 20 days. Don’t attempt to speed up, just go through the whole routine as a slow drill.

You will find that the speed increases naturally over time, but don’t rush this process happening. It’s vital that you focus on the quality of the moves you perform and not the speed, so that you don’t reinforce bad habits as they occur. After the three weeks, assess your progress. If you don’t feel it’s 100% ready yet, repeat the drill for a few more weeks. It’s a slow and painful process, but you are conditioning yourself in just the same way a professional magician performs a trick in their act when working. The difference is that you are doing this in private and being mindful of each and every step in the process.

View magic tricks like the courses of a meal

Mastering the performance of a trick is your first goal, but the process does not stop there. It’s important that you don’t look at each trick you do as an island. They are better viewed as stepping stones that need to be aligned with each other to work effectively. It’s important to group the tricks you know into ‘sets’. These are collections of tricks that work well together and naturally flow, much like a meal:

Aperitif – Your Introduction

Starter – Your strong visual opener

Palette cleanser – A ‘middle’ trick, story or joke as a ‘bridge’

Main course – Your main effect building to a good climax

Dessert – A stunning closer – Memorable and high impact

Coffee’s – Your farewell

The example above is a three trick set. It has an opener, a main trick and a closer. The three tricks are helped to run smoothly together by their context and your charm (The Palette cleaner) and they sit inside bookends of a professional introduction and a good conclusion.

Make sure you don’t become a clone.

It is very easy to watch a performance that you enjoy and to believe that is the only way to perform that effect. Do not fall into this trap! You can learn much from someone else’s performance and experiences such as points of finesse and timing, sleights and even some jokes. However, if you clone another magician’s performance it will seem unnatural and even forced to your spectators.

Discover who YOU are

When starting out, your main goal should be to have fun. Try out all the areas of magic that you can. Find out what you really like to perform. I usually recommend self-working tricks when you begin. ‘Easy to perform’, means you start performing as quickly as possible! Performance is the best way to learn about the type of magician you should become. Will you have a dry presentation? Maybe you will be edgy? Will your delivery be slow and stylish? Will you be sinister or mysterious? To practice the presentation of a trick, you first need to understand WHO will be performing it? Once you know that, can you start to be selective by getting this next thing right:

Think before you buy something new to learn

When you are new to magic, it’s very easy to get carried away collecting more and more new trick. It’s important to slow this down, and much of it is the fun of shopping, rather than the serious job of becoming a better magician. If the only reason you picked a new trick was because it fooled you, chances are it’s probably not the right trick to learn next. You need to choose your magic by more than just your ability to ‘work it out’. Before you invest any more time on learning the trick, ask yourself the following three questions:

Will it fit my style?
Can I make it entertaining?
Where would it fit into my ‘set’ of tricks?

If the answer to these questions is positive, then it’s worth starting the process of learning the trick and building it into a working performance ready routine. Sometimes you may buy a trick just to find out how it works, but remember that is best looked upon as research rather than act building.

If you would like to learn more about topic. You are welcome to download a free copy of my book Approaching Magic Practice.

Best wishes and good luck with your magic

Dominic Reyes

Originally published in MagicSeen Magazine (July 2016)

Feedback and Reviews about Merchant of Magic

Dominic Reyes – Magiens Verden Magazine Interview – Magic Practice

by Dominic Reyes 1 Comment

Interview with Dominic Reyes, conducted by Sune Alexandersen and published in MAGIENS VERDEN Magazine November 2015

– Tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been into magic and how did your interest start?

Hello everyone! I’m Dominic Reyes and I’m lucky enough to get to do something I would quite happily do for free, as a career. For the past 20 years, I’ve been a professional close-up magician, and I also own a bricks and mortar magic shop called The Merchant of Magic (www.MagicShop.co.uk)

I became fascinated by magic as a kid. I loved watching it on TV, but never though it would be something I would do. I played with magic sets given to me at Christmas, but then I discovered ‘girls’ and life got in the way… It wasn’t until my first term at university studying for a Psychology Degree that I discovered my first trick. It’s odd, but it happened because I was trying to buy a unicycle…

The guys in my student house were into juggling/circus skills for a laugh that summer. I got the bug and headed into town to buy a unicycle. You know how it is when you are prepared to do ANYTHING as a distraction from study and revision… The small shop also had a stand of magic tricks, and I picked up a Vernet Thumb Tip and silk. Just the thing to freak out everyone that evening in the house! It did, and at that moment I discovered my first important lesson in magic:

If you show people something magical and cool, they are going to say ‘Show us more…’ you better have something to follow it up..

I only had one trick! The next day, I was back at the shop waiting for it to open. I slowly brought every trick they sold. The shop only stocked ten items, but it was enough for me to discover I simply loved performing magic more than anything else. I was hooked for life.

You’ve written an excellent ebook on the art of practicing magic, and you’ve even made it freely available. Tell us how did the project start and why did you choose to give it away for free?

Thank you, that’s nice of you to say. The project came about through playing with ‘big data’. The magic shop has been going online for the past 16 years. That’s a lot of data about magicians buying habits. I noticed something interesting in the data. The life cycle of a beginner is roughly six months. After half a year, most people with a casual interest in close-up magic tricks move on to their next new hobby. If they continue past six months, there is a second drop off point after two years. Every day, hundreds of people discover magic, and hundreds forget about it. It’s a constant renewing cycle, and, on the whole, is a good thing. Out of this ‘churn’ rises a handful of magicians that continue to develop and become excellent. It’s just like panning for gold. The more full pans of sand, the more nuggets of gold get found. The sand will simply drop back into the river.

So, why the drop-off? The data showed me a lot more things. It’s a sample over 16 years of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. The most significant factor that influenced this drop-off rate was how magicians approach magic practice.

Keeping a magic shop’s customers in love with magic long enough for it to become a lifelong passion, is pretty important to a magic shop. It’s also important to magic as an art. There’s so little taught on the subject. Most magic tricks deal with WHAT to learn, rather than how to approach learning it. How many magic tricks have you brought that come with a study plan?

That’s why I wrote Approaching Magic Practice. It’s my small attempt try to stop people getting frustrated with the lack of progress they often experience in the first few months of learning to become a magician.

I’m getting loads of thank you emails about the book. Almost everyone seems surprised that I’ve made it free. It’s simple really.. I don’t want to SELL it. I don’t want to have to persuade people to read it. I already sell over 20,000 magic tricks through Merchant of Magic. Approaching Magic Practice isn’t a ‘product’. The book is paying something forward and trying to stop people from dropping out of the hobby because they don’t feel they can become as good as they should be.

In the first month of release, the book has already been downloaded many thousands of times from readers all over the world. If I charged for the book, many of them simply wouldn’t spend their ‘magic bucks’ on it. Magicians who don’t have a systematic program of practice tend to focus on buying new magic tricks constantly. They tend to jump from trick to trick, never really mastering any of them. Most magicians want to purchase ‘tricks’ rather than something about practice.. Those people are exactly who the book has been geared to help the most, so making it free, means more people will read it.

– Tell us a little bit about the project?

The book is 102 pages of advice I give to magicians that come to the magic shop for personal tuition, or that contact me through my blog. There’s a systematic method of daily practice that you can apply to every magic trick you want to master. I teach the 20/20/20 practice drill method. It’s a tried and tested system that’s ideal for people that don’t have a lot of time on their hands. I’ve tried hard to make it light and easy to read and it’s peppered with questions and answers from magicians that have contacted the shop over the years to ask about learning a technique.

Topics Include:

Why magicians waste so much time getting little result
How to avoid the ‘pitfall of choice’
A structured, focused practice program
Ways to stay motivated
How to judge your progress
The psychology of practice techniques
How to spot and correct errors
Example study programs
Ways to Improve your existing material
How to build presentation into your practice
The 20/20/20 method of practice
Techniques to avoid performance drift
How to set practice goals
The best way to remove a practice plateau

What are some common pitfalls magicians fall into when practising?

There’s quite a few, but the good news is that they are all easy to fix. The most common pitfall is the ‘magic binge’. Your excitement about magic means that you practice for hours at a time in huge ‘all evening’ practice sessions. These tend to be unstructured with no set goal in mind. The results tend to be disappointing as you either get ‘burned out’ and stop practicing for a while, decide you just don’t have enough time to commit to regular practice, or you get bored and jump for one trick to the next, so no real progress is made. These binge sessions slowly transform into browsing the internet for new tricks, watching magic DVD’s, reading magic books, or browsing the internet magic forums. That’s valuable research, but it’s not PRACTICE.

To fast track your progress, you need to have a structured program of practice you can do every day. Frequent short sessions are much better than long binges because of the way our brains process information. In the book, I discuss some of the psychology behind this, and how to use that to your advantage.

Is there such a thing as negative training?

Yes. Very much so. I open the book with a quote from Michael Ammar:

‘Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.’

If you are not mindful of your technique when you practice, you make small mistakes. These become ingrained through repetition. It’s vital that your technique is as perfect as you can make it as you drill the moves. The key here is to go SLOWLY. Don’t try to build up speed as you practice. Speed happens naturally over time as you progress. Slow everything down as much as possible Aim for perfect technique. Going slow is also a good corrective method if you are trying to remove a bad habit that has developed over time.

– Any advice for new magicians? How can they establish good habits early on and is this important?

When someone is just starting out, it’s just important to have fun. Try out all the areas of magic that you can. Find out what you really like to perform. I always recommend going for super easy self-working tricks when you begin. Easy to perform, means that it will be easy to get you performing! Performance is the best way to learn about the type of magician you should become. Will you be fast paced and edgy? Will you be slow and stylish? Will you be dark and mysterious? Serious or comical? How can you begin to practice the presentation of any trick, until you understand WHO the magician is that will be performing it? Once you decide that you are serious about mastering magic, it’s important to become selective…

Choose tricks and effects FIRST, and then master the controls, moves and sleights you need in order to perform those tricks. Now you have improved your skills with a goal at the end.

Which move should you learn next? Start researching effects that you can build into sets of tricks to form an act. Be selective. Pick tricks that amaze you, but that will also entertain an audience. They need to be perfect for the type of venue you will perform within, and the type of people that will be there.

Once you have selected your tricks, start on JUST ONE, and work on the controls, moves, and sleight of hand that is required to fully master it.

Any advice for seasoned magicians? How can old (bad) habits be changed or adjusted?

We get a lot of working professionals coming to the shop for some coaching. It’s usually because they have a growing sense that they are not getting the same reactions that they used to get from their material, but don’t know why. I usually recommend that we record them performing at one of their gigs. If they can set it up, it gives them an invaluable insight that can sometime be quite unsettling. Bad habits sneak into everyone’s performance over time, and then become ingrained through repetition. Luckily, they can easily be removed or adjusted once they have been identified. Approaching Magic Practice focuses on creating good habits right from the start by slowing the repetition of a tricks moves right down during a ‘drill process’. That makes sure that bad habits don’t become ingrained. However, once you are aware of a bad habit, you can slow things down again and start to correct the error through repetition.

It doesn’t matter how old you are, or how long you have been performing. Using a structured, focuses, and regular practice system will greatly improve the results you get over time.

– Are magicians learning too much?

I think we constantly feel the need to learn new tricks and techniques to stay up to date. This desire to stay at the forefront of what is happening in the world of magic can be the biggest distraction from your magic practice. We’ve all experienced the feeling of excitement when a new trick comes out, we can’t wait to try it out, and we drop everything to do so. If you are in the middle of magic practice on another technique or trick, you’ve dropped it before you have mastered it. Often, by the time that you resume your practice on that particular skill, it is almost like you have never even looked at it before. I don’t think magicians learn too much; we should all be constantly learning. The problem is trying to learn too many tricks at once.

Sign off

It’s a pleasure! I’m really pleased with the reception that the book has had. Your readers can download a free copy at:

http://magictricks.magicshop.co.uk/magicians-practice-magic-tricks-ebook

I’d love some feedback from your readers about the book. Did they find it useful? What else should I have included?

I can be contacted directly at http://www.dominicreyes.me

Best wishes and good luck with your magic

Dominic Reyes

How to Keep Your Magic Tricks Interesting – Using Variation Techniques

by Dominic Reyes 3 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

How can magicians make their magic tricks more interesting and keep the attention of their audiences?

Times have changed, and audiences simply don’t have the attention spans that they did in the age before the internet, TV, and Smartphones. Popular culture has taken it’s toll on the ability of an audience to hold fixed attention for any extended length of time.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span. – Karl Kraus

The problem of reduced attention spans is only going to get worse over time. Kids are growing up in a new type of society, where they are focused more on screens than real world interaction. Children are developing their minds in a world where everything is a quick ‘search on google’ away. The need to put effort into accessing information is reducing all the time. As children develop, their social and emotional development may be hindered by a lack of contact and conversation. Real world interaction shapes a child's intellect. The shorter time spent interacting with people – and the more time the spend in their own passive relationship with a computer screen, the less time they have to develop the ability to read nonverbal cues from people. The next generation may be the worst in history at reading behaviour face-to-face, in real time, and expect all their information and entertainment to be served to them as quickly as possible.

For close up magicians, this situation is even more pressing. The performing conditions at a party or dinner are filled with competing draws on the spectators attention. How should magicians deal with this problem?

The secret to holding a spectators attention is VARIATION. It’s use within your close up magic act is a powerful way to keep your audience engaged with the show you are presenting to them. People get bored quickly, and that leads to distraction. Making sure that you add enough variation into the magic tricks you perform, is a powerful way to keep them interested and involved with your magic.

Variation isn’t speed.

In an attempt to be interesting, some magicians simply try to increase the pace of their magic. In the hope of keeping the audience on the edge of their seats, those magicians try to cram in as many different tricks and flourishes as possible, and perform them at break neck speed. The result isn’t usually good. Speed can cause confusion, which in turn leads to boredom and frustration. It’s important that you go vary your pace and keep the energy up throughout your act, but sometimes slowing down can be just as engaging for spectators. The key is to have a variation in both speed and pace, as well as in the types of magic tricks you perform.

You can present only card magic tricks and still have variation.

In order to vary the content of your act, you don’t have to change the style of magic you perform. If you are a card magician, it’s fine to only use playing cards. If you are a mind reader, there is no need to switch to coin tricks in the middle of your show, to give your act variation. The props can remain the same, but the presentations that you use should have variety. Adding in fast, punchy magic, slow emotional pieces, and a little comedy, can give variation to an act which have a strong common theme running through it. A great example of this can be seen in the work of Derren Brown. His shows are all mentalism, but he plays with pace, comedy and style in a way that creates variation within his show.

Core techniques to create variation in a magic act.

There are many ways to ‘mix things up’ in you magic tricks set.

Speed: Change the speed of your presentations and actions within specific tricks, and also within the framework of your whole act. This gives your magic a dynamic quality and keeps the audience focused on you and your magic.

Duration: Work through each of your routines and try to identify any slow or ‘dead’ parts where nothing is happening. Think about how you could change the routines to reduce these dull moments as much as possible. Ensure that each magic trick has a ‘punch’ quite quickly in its performance. Pay attention to how your spectators react when you present a magic trick to them. Could you bring the ‘moment of magic’ forward by a simple change to the method? Could you introduce a little magical event that occurs before the main ‘effect’, so the audience gets magic along the way? As you develop as a magician, your magic will go through a natural process of culling. The tricks become ‘tight’ as you remove unnecessary parts, pauses and procedure from each presentation.

Shock: The best magic routines add in a little shock or surprise into the mix. The audience is led down a false path, an outcome suddenly changes, or something simply appears or vanishes. Structure your act so it becomes hard for your audience to double guess what is coming next. Nobody wants to be watching a magic trick when they know what the outcome will be.

So you see, it’s quite possible to build a successful act with a specialised theme like mind reading, playing cards or coin magic. Any collection of magic tricks can be as engaging as the next. Variation is the magic secret to ensure that the shrinking attention spans of your audience don’t work against you. Adding variation techniques to your existing magic act can breath new life into your show, and ensure it’s suitable for a future audience that have been raised in the age of Google.