learning magic Archives

How Magicians Learn Magic Tricks – Chatting about Magic Tricks Part 1

This is a semi cleaned up transcription of the first episode of the MoM podcast. Three Magicians sat in a magic shop chatting about magic tricks. Too busy read it all? You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to the podcast. Still with us? Ok, we have broken it up into three parts. Part one discusses how, when and where to practice your magic tricks.

How Magicians Learn Magic Tricks

Dominic Reyes Today we’re going to discuss practice techniques and the way that you can get the most out of learning new magic tricks. I should introduce myself first. I’m Dominic Reyes, the owner of Merchant of Magic and I’ve been performing magic professionally for almost 20 years now and I’m joined today by Ben Williams.

Ben Williams Hello. I’ll just jump in there. My names Ben Williams, I’ve been performing magic for nearly 15 years and performing professionally for about 7 and I’ve been lucky enough to work here at the Merchant of Magic with Dominic for many years. I’ll pass you over to Paul.

Paul Knight I’m Paul Knight. I’m a performing magician. I’ve been doing it for about 13 years and I’ve been working here for at least 3 months now.

Dominic Reyes Three long months.

Ben Williams Tedious months.

Dominic Reyes No, seriously, we love you really. So we’re going to talk about practice techniques. Ben do you want to kick off?

Ben Williams Yeah, I think we’re just going to start out some tips and chat about them first, so one of the things I like to do, is to perform a move and actually look at what the real move that you’re doing is. So if you’re trying to vanish a coin by putting it in your hand you should learn what putting a coin in your hand actually looks like. You’re replicating what the real general move looks like because when you start developing slight of hand moves there are tell tale signs that crop up for everybody. If you don’t study what you’re actually supposed to be showing them then when you’re going to be putting a coin in your hand that’s going to look funny. It’s not going to look like what putting a coin in your hand should look like. So I always think about doing these moves, I always practice what I’m supposed to be doing first. I will genuinely put a coin in my hand and squeeze it about 10 or 20 times. Then I would look at everything from when my right hand puts a coin in, What my right hand does after that, it naturally bounces by your side, your hand closes, you know. Just general movements and try and replicate as much as you can. Yeah. That would be my first tip.

Paul Knight When you’re practicing do you do it in front of the TV?, or do you sit in silence?

Ben Williams It depends on what I’m doing. Say if I’m doing the classic pass then I would happily sit and watch an episode of Emmerdale. Yeah, something classy like that. And I’d quite happily sit there and perform the move repeatedly over and over and over again because that helps with the muscle memory. That helps with the technique that you’re supposed to be doing, but also your mind is somewhere else. Because that’s essentially what you’re doing when you’re doing magic. You’re talking to somebody whilst you might be doing a billion other things in the background which they’re unaware of. So if you can practice and coherently watch a TV show at the same time, then you’re training your body to do these two things at the same time which is a great thing. But there are exceptions to which I’m sure you agree.

Dominic Reyes What do you do Paul?

Paul Knight Well flourishes and sleights, I do what you were just saying, so the mechanics of the magic tricks. I would quite happily sit in front of the TV and practice over and over and over again until it’s second nature like doing up your shoelaces. However, if I was doing a routine or an actual magic trick in itself, which would involve patter, a story, say with a beginning or an end to it, I would always listen to music because music is a distraction from the actual performance.

Ben Williams Yeah, I can totally understand that. I think there’s an awesome magician and a good friend of mine, Eric JonesJones, who only performs and practices his coin magic to music because it’s like a metronome because you get a beat and you get a rhythm. So as you’re performing you get this flow, it’s natural, you eliminate dead spots. It’s a rhythm, it’s a flow. It’s great with coin magic, it’s really helpful, it’s really, really helpful.

Paul Knight A good way to jazz actually is to practice to music. The practicing of sleights slowly, then faster and then it becomes even quicker.

Ben Williams You’ll find things like misdirection will flow a lot easier if you practice with a rhythm then you can establish that rhythm when you perform.

Dominic Reyes It’s a bit like when you learn to drive. When you are learning clutch bite on the pedals. At first all you can do is concentrate on that, and it feels really alien, but then you’re so busy looking at the road, you forget about your feet and once you are a driver you don’t think about that at all.

Paul Knight Another good example is something that everybody does, your morning routine. What do you do when you get out of bed.? You pick up your wallet and pick up your watch. Well, this is my morning routine.

Ben Williams I put my clothes on.

Paul Knight I haven’t done that enough times for it to be in my muscle memory.

Ben Williams Okay, this is where you need to start practicing isn’t it.

Dominic Reyes It’s the same thing, you don’t think about it because you’re doing it so often. It becomes almost a mundane action.

Ben Williams It’s funny, somebody actually posted up the other day asking when did my morning routine change? I used to get up and go and have a coffee and have a shower and now I get up and check my Facebook and check my emails and check my forum posts and things like that. The world is a funny place isn’t it?

Dominic Reyes Well, talking about routine, I would ask how often to practice? There are two ways that I hear from customers coming into the shop and talking to us. Some people will have maybe one night a week where they sit down and they say that’s my weeks practice night. That often tends to be watching magic DVDs and reading books and i’m afraid that’s not practice.

Ben Williams No, that’s very important to establish. Learning magic is not practicing magic.

Dominic Reyes Yeah, and then other people, including myself when I’m learning a new move or a new technique, is a short burst of practice, sort of like 10 minutes, often through the day. Maybe 10 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes at night. I have a deck of playing cards in various rooms of the house. I have one next to the kettle, one next to a phone and as I walk past I can practice. I can run through a routine. I think having those breaks allows you to consolidate the information that you’ve learned.

Ben Williams And then view it with fresh eyes.

Paul Knight That’s it. How many lectures have you been to which have been fantastic. They’re two hours long and you sit there and a billion jokes or lines have gone by which you’re like, oh, I’ll remember those, those will go into my working set. I’ll remember that trick and by the end of the two hours you’ve been so bombarded by information that you carry very little through with you on your own. You know, you would need to be writing everything down and noting everything and it’s just the same with practice. If you just go into practicing for a long session, it’s not as productive as it could be. If you give yourself breaks and do it in short, sharp bursts, it’s a lot more effective.

Ben Williams A bit like revision for an exam. You have a burst, then a rest, maybe a nights sleep and the next day it puts your brain in a fresher place.

Paul Knight People are always saying they haven’t got enough time to practice. Time is always pushing and, you know, life commitments, families and so forth, but how much time do you need? Five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the evening. Keep doing that all week long and that short burst will develop you a lot quicker than sitting there in the evening and going over and over and over it.

Ben Williams Yeah, 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes in the evening is nothing but that totals up to over an hour’s worth of practice over a week.

Dominic Reyes Sometimes you’ve got to really focus on it, especially if you’re learning a magic trick and you’ve really got to focus on the instructions. For example: Stand Up Monte By Garrett Thomas Where you’ve got a multiphase routine, you have to do everything in that order. That’s going to take time. So you’ve learnt the flow, but once you’ve got that you can then practice in short sessions often.

Ben Williams In fact something like Stand Up Monte would be the ideal example of something you should practice to music, because you can really pay attention to it, you can get the timing and the flow along with the music and then..

Paul Knight And you can jazz with it, once you understand it.

Ben Williams Once you can jazz with it. [Laughter] Such a great magic trick, but yeah, very convoluted sort of handling which you know you definitely need to practice.

Dominic Reyes They say you can become an expert at something if you do it 10,000 times or spend 10,000 hours on it. If you sit down and you do loads and loads of repetitions you’re going to burn out and after a while you’re just going to skip on to the next trick, whereas if you make it short sessions often, you can keep that energy going. You can keep it fresh and develop into it.

Ben Williams Consider David Stone, this is different, because it’s practicing for competition but David Stone practices his magic in both hot and cold climates, so he will go into a walk in refrigerator and practice his magic and he will go and sit in a sauna and practice, so he can perform with his hands being really clammy or hot and also really cold and sensitive… This is again for competition not in general, but if you want to nail something 100% of the time and you can’t afford to cut corners, he takes 100 matchsticks and he does his move or his routine and if he gets it right he will move his matchstick into a pile and if he gets it right again he moves another matchstick across and he does this again, when he gets it right he moves a matchstick across and he keeps doing this until he gets 100 moves in a row correctly. If at any point he gets it wrong all those matchsticks on the left hand side get moved over to the original pile again and he starts again until he’s done it 100 times in a row correctly. To be fair, that may well be a bit over the top, but…

Paul Knight Did he win?

Ben Williams He placed. He didn’t win, but…

Dominic Reyes His house burnt down. [laughter]

Paul Knight Well, that’s an interesting insight as to how a competition magician would practice something, when he needs to nail it just once on the night, boom.

Dominic Reyes Is that individual sleights and moves, or would that be running the whole routine?

Ben Williams You know I think he breaks his routine down into sections. He will practice his bottle production over and over again and then he’ll practice the bottle through table over and over again, and then he’ll practice the object inside bottle over and over again, and once he’s done them all perfectly and he’s got them down he’ll merge them all together into a routine.

Dominic Reyes And how do you tend to do it,? Do you tend to do it in chunks like that or do you run through the magic tricks from start to finish?

Ben Williams If I try to practice the whole routine I will end up realizing I’ve stopped in the middle of the routine because part of it didn’t look right in the mirror and I’m redoing that part. You can’t do that in real life.

Paul Knight I do that. I’m guilty of that.

Dominic Reyes I think you’ll find quite a few people probably are. You get lost in your own moment, you’re saying to yourself “that didn’t quite look good, how do I make it look good.”

Ben Williams You are being a critic of yourself all the way through, you’re monitoring it and saying how do I do this,? how do I do that? and you only actually half paying attention to the routine. If you actually did it start to finish and if you went wrong, you stopped you would very, it would take you ages to get to the end of the routine.

GO TO PART 2

How Magicians Use Misdirection

by Merchant of Magic 4 Comments

The new magic tricks you have ordered have finally arrived! That package is just waiting to be ripped open and it’s secrets consumed! You play with the props and have a go at working out how the trick is done, then settle down to read or watch the instructions. If you picked wisely, you have a great magic routine to practice and perform. If not.. well, there’s always something to learn from any magic trick. Chances are, even a magic trick that did not live up to your expectations can help you develop your skills and understanding. But there is almost always something missing…

What they never teach you

There’s a group of core skills that will set a magician apart from someone who only buys and performs tricks from a magic shop. It’s not included in the instruction DVD’s that come with the tricks, yet is probably the most important to learn. It’s misdirection techniques.

Understanding how magicians use misdirection will allow you to make your magic more powerful. It is vital to successfully fooling your audience. Misdirection makes magic stronger. It makes you a better performer. However, it is the ‘unspoken’ art within magic, and finding good theory and resources on the topic is hard to come by.

How magicians use misdirection

This may surprise you, but there really are some people who find the term ‘misdirection’ offensive. They argue that to use the prefix ‘mis’ generally has negative connotations. Words such as ‘mistake’, ‘misfortune’, ‘misunderstand’ and ‘misuse’ all suggest negative aspects of the technique. So ‘misdirection’ implies that you have failed at ‘directing’. So if we want to keep everyone happy and can’t call it ‘misdirection’, what do we call it? We don’t have any problem with the term ‘misdirection’; however, some people prefer to call it ‘Direction of Attention’. In a way this does express its meaning much more clearly, and doesn’t have the negative connotations of using ‘mis’. Whatever you like to call it, the great news is that it’s not hard to do at all, if you know what you are doing.

‘Misdirection has nothing to do with distraction. It has everything to do with controlling audience attention, at all times.’ – Gary Kurtz

“Not only shouldn’t they see anything, they shouldn’t suspect anything” – Erdnase

As a magician, you must learn how magicians use misdirection to make sure your spectators don’t see the things you do not want them to see. It’s not about hiding moves. It’s not about turning your back while you do a suspicious half pass; it’s about controlling audience attention so that when you are going to make a move, the audience is not only focused somewhere else, but they don’t even suspect you are doing anything. It is about making sure that suspicion doesn’t even cross your spectator’s mind. ‘A sleight is not perfect when the spectators are unable to tell what you’re doing. Only when they’re completely unaware that you did anything at all, will they experience magic.’ – Jarle Leirpoll

Better than a poke in the eye

You’ve heard the old expression “the quickness of the hand deceives the eye” right? Well, guess what, it’s wrong! Eyes have the power to track you hand movements a lot faster than your hands are able to move. Quick moves done in full view only create suspicion, and we really do not want suspicion at all. The hand is not quicker than the eye. Misdirection is quicker than the eye!

Want to learn more? Clint Baron and The Merchant of Magic Team have put together a guide to help you understand how magicians use misdirection and ways to build it into your own performance. The free ebook will teach you the core principles to help improve your magic.

Why Should People Care About Your Magic Tricks

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

Another event, party, product launch, wedding or trade show. Good food, friends and entertainment all around and there’s a magician too!

“Did you see the magician? He was amazing! How on earth did he get my money inside an egg? Anyway.. about that project we need to work on next Wednesday….”

That’s it, that’s the sum of all the hard work most magicians produce after leaving a table. A chat about how good the magician was and how impossible the magic tricks were. Then it’s yesterdays news and life goes on. Why is that?

Let’s look at what was said in detail:

“Did you see the magician…”

Chances are your spectators will not remember your name just a few minutes after seeing you do something impossible they have never seen before. Let’s face it, who you are is completely overshadowed by what you did. The spectators know it was a magic trick, after all you were actually there as a magician professionally trained to fool them. The trick was great, but it’s ‘only’ entertainment. It has very little ‘meaning’ to the spectator other than a few minutes of fun in the whole context of their evening. The credit for it, in their minds is passed onto the event rather than you. ‘Wow, that party last night was amazing, did you see the magician?” The party gets the credit.

“He was amazing…”

Great job, well done! We all love hearing that, especially when we overhear it as we leave a room, or walk part a door and a table is talking about what they just saw. Wouldn’t it be better if they were using your name and talking about more than just how skilled you were? How can you connect at a deeper level than simply a review of your ability?

“How on earth did he get my money inside an egg?…”

The magic trick worked and they were fooled. Another good job. But wait, they are saying that they couldn’t work out the method you used. Essentially reducing what they saw to a puzzle and a question. They are not saying “I wonder if he could make money appear wherever he likes” or “If I could do that, I’d use that power to make a million pounds appear” They are trying to think up a solution to a problem you have given them.

“Anyway.. About that project we need to work on next Wednesday….”

That’s it… On to the next thing to entertain them, or the next discussion, the course of the meal or a trip to the bar. The rest of the evening rolls on, and your magic tricks form only a small part of that nights fun. If you are wise, you handed out business cards as much as possible, and some of the guests will have events being planned and took a card. But the majority of guests will not remember you personally.

A few ways you can make people care about your magic tricks:

(I’ll leave the best one until last)

1) Use your name at the beginning and end of the ‘act’. Remember how Paul Daniels used to get spectators to say “yes, Paul” all though his routines. That’s not just for the comedy value, but a deliberate yet subtle technique of repetition to make them remember his name. Check out Bill Malone‘s method, He gets everyone to chant “BILL..MA..LONE, BILL..MA..LONE” over and over again. Not so subtle at all but it’s funny and fits his style. Use your name often and also say their names as much a possible. Their name is one of the most important words they ever hear. You can make people care about your magic tricks, by linking it with something else that they already care about

2) Ask the group if they have any questions. Try it next time you do a table. Perform your favorite routine and then ask them if they have any questions about it. If you used a spectator to help you, stop for a moment and ask them to tell you how that made them feel.

Example: You ask a spectator to hold a sponge ball. You show another ball and vanish it, when the spectator opens their hand, they find your ball has appeared in their hand too! After the spectator calms down, ask her how she felt about it. She will say something like ‘wow, that felt so strange, it just appeared.. etc’. The the rest of the table will enjoy watching this, just like audiences love the ‘David Blaine‘ style spectator interviews on his specials.

You don’t need to turn the rest of the act into a discussion, but you will find a lot of the table do have questions they love to ask you. You can give them some funny answers and use that to lead into your next trick.

3) Don’t just be ‘The Magician’. People don’t care about tricks, they care about people. Make yourself more than just a member of staff at the event. If you have watched the Dynamo Magician Impossible TV series, you probably noticed that the framework for the show focuses on his back story. It’s about his friends, his family, where he grew up and even about his skeptical gran. That’s not filler. It’s designed to make you engage with him as a person and like him. Understanding who he is, gives him more emotional weight. His tricks fool you, but you also feel you know him as a person and he is so much more memorable because of this. This is one of the main reasons X-Factor became so popular and people love the audition shows. The back stories hook you to a particular performer and that leads you to support them through the finals.

You can do this by introducing magic tricks into your set that give your spectators an insight into you and your past. Introduce a trick as the one you had to learn to become a magician, and tell a back story about it. Build in some information about how you discovered magic and why you do it.
A good example of this sort of routine is the magic trick ChildsPlay. It uses a photograph of one of your family members to reveal a chosen playing card. The routine leads perfectly into telling the audience something about you as a person. If they care about you, they will love your magic so much more and you will be remembered long after the event has been forgotten.

Let them care about you.

If you want people to care about your magic tricks, remember this: People remember things they care about. If you give your audience a back story you help remove the faceless roll of ‘Magician’. Knowing about a person makes you care about that person. There’s no need to add your whole life story to your show, but if you look at the tricks you currently do, is there something you could add to give some information about yourself to the audience? Play with this and see if it helps you become more memorable.

Dominic Reyes

Please let us know your thought on this and any advice you would like to share in the comments section below: