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

by Merchant of Magic 2 Comments

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

by Merchant of Magic 3 Comments

Do 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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Getting Caught Out Performing Magic Tricks – Magician Eric Jones

by Merchant of Magic 15 Comments

Professional magician Eric Jones recorded this short video for The Merchant of Magic, in which he revealed a valuable secret to becoming a better magician. He told us about something that he wished had been different, when he started out learning his magic tricks.
When you perform your magic tricks, do you ever worry about being caught out and the magic tricks secret being revealed?

For many magicians, their worst fear is that they may have accidentally flashed or revealed a move, forget an important misdirection point, or inadvertently telegraph a sleight. In that moment, the magic trick has failed. The magician is busted, his secret revealed, and everyone knows it. Is that really the worst thing that could happen?

Eric Jones understands that magic practice is often motivated by fear. Once you go through the process of learning the moves, timing and presentation for your magic tricks, you start a much longer, and painful process of building up confidence in your performances and techniques.

You continue practicing the magic tricks with a critical obsession for detail far above the level of perception that your spectators will give the performance. That’s a good thing, as long as it does not prevent you from performing. Without live performance being part of the process of mastering a magic trick, you won’t gain a full understanding of the dynamics and social aspects of the magic tricks. You need to test out your magic tricks on live spectators.

Honesty

Building up confidence requires testing your magic tricks with live spectators. Eric Jones recommends that you watch their reactions and learn from their feedback. The more feedback you get, the more you can adjust your technique and presentation. However, the feedback must be honest.

Getting honest feedback is harder than you would think. Your family and friends care about you, and don’t want to hurt your feelings. They know how much time and attention you put into your magic tricks and how important they are to you. Because they love you, they don’t want to hurt your feelings, so will often tell you what they think you want to hear. They are forgiving if you have accidentally revealed a secret techniques, and because they like you already, they don’t need to be won over by your personality. This makes it very hard to get REAL honest feedback from them.

Even professional magicians find getting feedback from ‘strangers’ hard. People, on the whole, are polite and easy going. They feel embarrassed if a magic trick does not go right, and they are unlikely to point out details. They want to be entertained and for your magic to work. Some people who give you feedback may be drunk, be motivated by wanting the groups attention, or simply wanting to be funny. Knowing how to filter the real constructive feedback from the ‘noise’ can be a challenge.

Regardless of who gives you feedback, there is another element that needs to happen from time to time, for feedback to be the most constructive. It’s uncomfortable, but magicians benefit from:

Being caught out

Every magician gets caught out every now and then, when it comes to live performance. A spectator may catch a flash of a coin, the corner of a card that’s in palm or simply reverse engineer the magic trick in the middle of a performance. The more experienced the magician, the less that happens, but it still does for everyone, now and then.

Professional magicians worry about being caught out far less than beginners. Not just because they are more experienced with the mechanics of the magic tricks, but because they understand that it is inevitable and will not ruin everything.

If a flash happens, only one or two people may catch it. Most people won’t say anything, and the magic moves on quickly to another climax point and the ‘flash’ is forgotten. They may see something odd, but it does not expose the whole method, so the magic trick can still entertain them.

Magic is interesting, and that’s it’s most important ‘feature’. Being entertaining is far more important than your technical skills. Technique should be perfected, and your skills developed to become the best they can be, but audiences are much more forgiving that magicians think. Your audience will be happy as it is being entertained. The danger comes from your act being dry and boring. Then, you are only holding the audience’s attention through your technical skills. If they fail, the audience is left with nothing, so the entertainment factor can only come from reacting to your mistakes. If this is happening to you, then you need to work on making your act entertaining, and interesting FIRST, then move on to sharpen your technique.

Do This:

Make a point to seek out feedback whenever you can.
If you make a mistake, don’t give yourself a hard time about it.
View getting caught as a learning opportunity.
Take careful note of it and write about it in your magic journal, just after the show.
Think about a few ways that you could have prevented the mistake from happening.
Building up notes on how you could have improved each situation.
Seek out honest opinions, no matter how painful they may be.

Related Posts:

Danger signs for professional magicians

How to learn coin tricks

Things to do when your magic tricks go wrong

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