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Magic Tricks For Magicians Vs Magic Tricks For The Public

Are there really just two kinds of magic tricks that magic shops sell, magic tricks for magicians, and magic for everyone else?

If you perform magic tricks for your family and friends or other magicians, the type of tricks you choose can be quite different from those you should select to perform to the public. When you are choosing a new magic trick to work on, how do you know which type of trick it is?

Who is your real audience?

When you browse though a magic shop and read the descriptions, notice how easy it is to understand very quickly, exactly what happens in the trick. The trick should be able to be described in just one or two sentences:

A thought of playing card changes colour – The Brainwave Deck
A playing card is torn up and restores itself – Slide
A finger ring vanishes and appears on the magicians, car keys – Departure Ring Flight

If the plot of a particular trick cannot be described simply, it’s probably more suited to be performed for other magicians. The public wants direct quick ploys, especially for close-up magic conditions. The magic needs to be instantly understandable.

Don’t think about ‘how’

When choosing a magic trick, try not to think about the method of the trick initially. First think about what the ‘story’ of the trick is for the spectators. Ask yourself if this ‘story’ or as it’s often called in the magic community, it’s ‘effect’ would fit with your style, be amazing, and more importantly be entertaining. A magic trick can have an incredibly clever method. One that other magicians will be really impressed to see. The ‘method’ is stunning, but the ‘effect’ is dull to laypeople, its plot is not direct and simple. Choose the magic tricks you want to spend your precious practice time on carefully, taking into account who your audience will be.

Avoid these magic tricks for magicians

If you want to make your magic more commercial and entertaining, avoid the following:

Magic tricks that have overly complicated plots.
Magic tricks that require the spectators to remember more than one thing at a time.
Tricks that force the audience to pay close attention though several stages of the plot.

Save those types of tricks for your ‘magic friends’. Complicated tricks are not ‘bad’ in and of themselves, but it’s important to choose the right type of trick for the people who will be watching it.

The Merchant of Magic produces free guides, magic ebooks and videos giving advice to improve your magic. Our free newsletters can help you become a better magician and our team can suggest tricks that would suit your performing style and practice goals.

Magicians Bad Habits – Chatting About Magic Tricks Part 2

by Merchant of Magic 2 Comments

Part 2 of the cleaned up transcript of the MoM Podcast episode 1. Three magicians sat in a magic shop talking about practicing their magic tricks. This section is about magicians bad habits.

Pauls Bad Habit:

Paul Knight One of my bad habits is when I’m learning or practicing routines or tricks, whatever you wish to call it, I start making my own patter as I’m learning it. I should really learn the trick first then revisit it and try and figure out a patter and there’s not much advice out there on patter.

Dominic Reyes It’s tricky because you don’t want to just practice in silence because you’re not going to perform in silence. So using the voice acts as a cue to the moves. Especially later, if you practice over a long period and then try and show it to someone you find you hesitate and you pause and you freeze, generally it tends to be the fact that you’ve been practicing in silence.

Paul Knight You’ve been practicing the moves and the mechanics of the magic trickstricks, but not actually the performance of the effect. Practicing the performance and learning about that is just as important really. If you want to be serious.

Ben Williams So how do you do that? How do you practice?

Paul Knight I actually speak out loud when I’m on my own practicing. Once I did set up three teddy bears around the table and practiced it on those. I was having a great conversation and the patter flowed, but the reaction wasn’t what I expected. [Laughter]

Dominic Reyes Really?

Paul Knight It was a tough gig. That helped though. This sounds really ridiculous, but it helped.

Ben Williams It was a fluff gig. {Laughter]

Paul Knight It gave me points to look at, places to look at when I was performing. Which gave me cues to what part in the routine am I?

Ben Williams Exactly, I was going to bring up the point of practicing in the mirror. Practicing in the mirror is very important for getting your angles right. But if you get too caught up in doing that you will find that you’re performing your routine and you’re looking at yourself in the mirror as you do it.

When you go to perform to a real person your eyes aren’t going to be looking at yourself in the mirror. They’re going to be looking at the spectator in front of you, oh, did that person to the right see something? And your mind is in totally different places and looking at different things too. So sometimes when I’ve practiced the magic tricks and I know that my angles are good and I understand them I’ll step away from the mirror and I’ll just practice walking about. Just walking up and down my hallways practicing my patter as well because it takes you away from getting locked down. If you’re only practicing in one condition then once you step away from that condition it’s a whole new ballgame.

Dominic Reyes I agree. When I was learning the retention of vision vanish for example. I would practice it and repeat and repeat and repeat in front of the mirror. But once I didn’t have that feedback, I had a problem. I became reliant on the feedback to see whether it looks okay. It was really uncomfortable to perform the move and I wouldn’t do it.

Paul Knight Feels like everyone’s seeing it.

Ben Williams Exactly! Because you’re not getting that feedback. You’re not getting that instant check that it looks good. You need to know that it looks good in the mirror, but then you also need to practice it in the mirror so you know it looks good when you’re just looking at your hands.

Paul Knight You have to be practiced in this sort of way, if you want to feel confident. Sometimes when you perform, a spectator might whisper to another spectator, it can give you a clue that they’re following what you’re doing. Now they may well be, but the likelihood is that they think they know what you’re doing but are totally wrong.

Dominic Reyes They’re following the method they think.

Ben Williams Yeah, they’re going somewhere completely wrong, but if you don’t have confidence in your own sleights, if you haven’t practiced them enough, you’re just going to believe they know exactly what’s going on. That will cause you to speed up. It can cause you to rush through things, not allow you to be as entertaining as you can be and also it will bring down the quality of your performance for everyone else. At the end of the day, if you can have nine people really enjoy it and have one person figure it out or have 10 people not really enjoy it, which would you prefer?

Paul Knight I’d politely disregard the people who think they know..

Ben Williams Even if they know how it’s done, you get that. You can’t go through life being a magician and honestly say you’ve never had someone figured anything out that you’ve done.

Paul Knight You would be fooling yourself.

Paul Knight I’d like to fool someone just once though. [laughter]

Ben William You’ve fooled yourself. [Laughter]

Dominic Reyes I once took a part-time job where I was in a showroom as a salesman and the whole place was surrounded by great big glass windows, so I’m staring at a reflection of myself all day.

Dominic Reyes Retention, Classic Pass etc etc all day long… I’m running a coin roll all day when I’m on the phone and I’m watching it and watching it and then people started asking me ‘why are you closing your eyes?’ when I performed the moves at a gig.

Paul Knight I was just about to mention that.

Dominic Reyes Well, I don’t want to see it when I do a funny movie. It’s only by videoing myself later on, that I picked up that tell and it’s taken quite a while to get rid of it.

Paul Knight It’s a reluctance to see bad magic, I don’t know, because I do it as well.

Dominic Reyes If I can’t see it, they can’t see it.

Ben Williams You don’t know you’re doing it.

Dominic Reyes I wouldn’t have spotted that at all, so another good habit in your practice time is to video yourself and that can be quite painful to watch.

Ben Williams If you can, and not everyone has the facilities to do this, but if you can set up more than one camera so that you have multiple angles, it’s not so bad because everyone’s got some sort of video camera on their phone or you could just borrow your friends’ phones or have someone video you. You could get a nice little bit of footage of your magic tricks, which you can use to learn from.

Dominic Reyes Don’t just film yourself. Don’t just set up a camera and film yourself performing magic tricks. You can look on YouTube and find thousands of people doing that and you won’t learn very much. It needs to be you performing to an audience. You need to see the feedback you get, you need to see how you come across to an audience.

Paul Knight Even your stance.

Ben Williams Your stance, your speed, is something that you might find yourself doing is shifting your weight left to right foot nervously and you won’t pick that up unless you’re actually videoing yourself at all.

What magicians bad habits do you have? Let us know in the comments section below

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When Have You Practiced Enough Magic Tricks? – Chatting about Magic Part 3

by Merchant of Magic 1 Comment

The following is part 3 of the cleaned up transcript from Episode 1 of the MoM Podcast. Three magicians sat in a magic shop chatting about practicing magic tricks:

When have you practiced enough magic tricks?

Paul Knight Another thing, check are you acknowledging everyone at the table, whatever event it is, are you noticing everyone because it’s easy to just focus on one person.

Ben Williams Yeah, very much so. When I first started working, I had to get something out of my system. Approaching a table. I always had to practice what I’d run through, because there’s nothing worse than nervously hanging around and waiting to get people’s attention when it should be you controlling that situation. Practically everything, including the approach.

Paul Knight So how do you know when you’ve practiced enough magic tricks?

Ben Williams When you’re good like me. [Laughter]

Paul Knight What you can’t actually see reader, is that Ben closed his eyes when he said that.

Dominic Reyes I think that you never know. Until you start performing, until you start performing it in your set or you’re doing it to the public and you’re getting those reactions.

Paul Knight The last reaction is huge for any effect I think. That can either make you run with it or break it.

Ben Williams But you should run with, because most of the time it’s not the trick that’s bad, it’s a harsh reality that your performance may have been bad, or there’s a slight change that the person you show it to hates magic or has a personal problem or some really horrendous thing happen in their life and they’re not in the mood for it.

Paul Knight That’s a sign you should work on it really isn’t it, if you get a bad reaction.

Ben Williams What, your marriage? [Laughter]

Paul Knight If you get a bad reaction, work on your marriage. [Laughter]

Dominic Reyes I think that’s why there are a lot of magicians that would like to perform to the public and they’re practicing like mad with that goal, but they never feel that they’re get to the stage that they’re ready to actually do it. They’ll spend years and years learning magic tricks, learning all the moves yet they always feel like they’re still in training. I think that’s because you’ll never get to the stage when someone’s going to say ‘ right well done, here’s your certificate’. You may have mastered that trick years ago, but the only way you’re going to do it is start getting some experience out there ‘in the trenches’ You need to be able to say ‘I’ve learned that well enough to perform it’ then you can continue through and develop it though live performance.

Ben Williams Very much so.

Paul Knight It’s a case of dip your toe in the water. Is it too cold? Yes it is, jump in.

Ben Williams It’s funny that you actually mention this, because I said to Paul just the other day that we had a new magic trick arrive to the shop and I was practicing it. But I didn’t feel I could go out and show it yet. For the next couple of weeks I was showing people in the magic shop. They were all going ‘oh yeah, that’s really good and I discovered that the thing I felt un-confident about was the fact that I hadn’t yet performed it in front of people, I hadn’t properly performed it. That was the missing link. I had perfected the moves, I’d run through them so much. Everything was so smooth. The only thing that was holding me back was the actual performance of it. I now know, with this magic trick you have to show people to find which angles are good.

Paul Knight So are you going to do that with friends or are you just going to jump in the deep end next booking and try it.

Ben Williams

See, this is the thing, I would do that with friends, but friends don’t give you an entirely true response. At a gig, I might perform it to a group I’m really getting along with and they’re just happy that I’m there, and I’m having fun with them. I can say ‘Look, I’ve never done this before, shall we try it?’ I don’t tend to do this at paid gigs though.

Dominic Reyes It’s hard though to add a new piece in my set. I’ve got to the stage where I a new item is ready to introduce but it may be months before I get around to actually adding it. I know my set, I know it works well, I know the timing. So it’s hard to mess with that.

Paul Knight It’s second nature. The act has been a part of your practice.

Dominic Reyes It never needs to be added in because it’s all going really well. I’ve got a beginning, a middle and an end. I can have a new magic trick ready to go and I’ve got it there on the back burner for months and then something may happen, perhaps I need extra time or a repeat booking and I’ll try it and bang, it’s finally included. I mean it’s a hard thing to introduce new magic to a working set.

Dominic Reyes Right, guys, we’re almost out of time now. Anyone got any last quick tips.

Paul Knight Not any sensible ones, no.

Ben Williams Practice makes perfect.

Paul Knight If you practice in front of a mirror, maybe try it with one eye closed, try that approach. No, see I told you.

Ben Williams Yeah, you could practice in glow in the dark clothing in the dark.

Dominic Reyes Right time to wrap it up I think.

Ben Williams I do believe.

Dominic Reyes Let’s go home.

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