practice Archives

How Magicians Find Their Core Skills – Advice from Gary Jones

Dominic Reyes up with professional magician Gary Jones, and he took time out to record a short video about discovering your own core skills in magic.

Gary Jones makes a valuable point here. It's so easy to feel that we need to master every move in magic. This gets reinforced as we watch other magicians perform, especially if you watch a lot of magic DVD's. We see many magicians, each performing their own magic tricks with an expert ease. In truth, we are seeing each performers BEST material. The half practiced, off the mark, or near miss material never gets the spot light. As a result, it's easy for us to assume that each professional magician is a master of all the classic techniques, and we should be the same.

In reality, each person has different strengths and weaknesses. One performer may naturally have a talent for manipulation, another may excel at palming, a third may not have much dexterity, but they are highly empathic and express that though skilled communication. Although some magicians achieve perfection across everything they work on, most tend to find a few core moves of techniques that they find easy to use. Once they have this core set of skills, they adapt and develop magic tricks that use these advantages.

DO THIS:

Make a list of the techniques that you find easy to perform.

Look at your other magic tricks and think about how they coul be adapted to use the moves you already have mastered.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Use your existing strengths, adapt your material and make the most of what you already know.

Why Sleight of Hand Isn’t Always Best for Magician

by Merchant of Magic 11 Comments

By Dominic Reyes

Sleight of hand is all well and good, but is it really any better than using gimmicks or self working magic tricks?

Sleight of hand for the sake of it.

Magicians are addicted to learning new moves and techniques. However, practice of sleight of hand just for the sake of it can be a sure fire way to waste your valuable practice time. Recreational practice is not a problem in and of itself, unless that’s all you’re doing.

If you decide to commit your valuable practice time to mastering a move, make sure you also have an application for it. Being able to perform 20 different colour changes is no better than mastering a single method, that fits perfectly in the magic trick you want to perform. You only need to learn one method, until you have another magic trick or routine that actually requires a different technique. Don’t waste time building things that you don’t have a use for. Spend your time collecting complete magic tricks, not individual moves.

Unnatural moves.

Everyone loves to invent. Magicians especially love creating and modifying sleight of hand. A problem can occur when it’s done for no other reason than to publish and name something.

At the Merchant of Magic, it’s rare that a day goes by without the team receiving a video clip from a magician who has ‘created’ a new variation. Sometimes these variations are awesome, but mostly they are a traditional classic move with a layer of unnaturalness added.

The goal of sleight of hand isn’t to be unique or different, but rather to do something invisibly. Sleight of hand needs to look like ‘nothing at all’. Perfect technique strips away any movement and hand positioning, leaving only normal ‘everyday’ handling or action. If a sleight adds anything unnatural to your movement or hand position, it could be weakening the magic trick rather than improving it.

The busy fool principle.

Despite what we were all told at school, how hard you work, is sadly, not a direct indication of your likeliness to succeed. Hard work only leads to success if it’s focused in the right direction. This is done by creating and working towards clearly defined goals.

If we take earning a living from magic as an example, any magician can get a full diary of gigs if their fee is low enough. A magician can easily do 5 gigs every week for a fee of £50 each. That magician works really hard and feels successful as they have as much work as they can handle. However, another magician can have a larger income by charging £300 per gig, but only landing a single booking each week.

In just the same way, many truly obsessed magicians practice night and day learning moves and sleights, but have not set a goal to build a magic act. They work like a ‘busy fool’ building their knowledge without any goals to make the effort pay off for them.

The Emperors new clothes.

The Emperor: ‘The collar’s always around the neck, the sleeves always come off the shoulders, the waist always goes around the middle! When will they invent something original?‘ – The Emperor’s New Clothes 1987

So many moves are published that are nothing more than pipe dreams, invented by magicians who never actually perform them. The moves get attention from other magicians who also learn them, without any real intent to perform them either.

The inventor gets plenty praise, and the students congratulate each other on their skills mastering these obscure moves. There are countless online discussion groups built around discussing, reviewing and often arguing over these techniques, their originality and development. There are even online magic shops that specifically repackage this behaviour into a fashionable lifestyle culture.

It’s a fun pastime, sold as ‘training magicians’. In reality, it may not be doing that at all.

Technique over entertainment

Which would you rather watch?

5 different variations of the classic pass (that should all look the same anyway)

5 different uses for an Invisible deck?

Which would teach and entertain you most? I don’t actually need to write any more on this to get the point across, do I?
Practice vs. the average magician.

Let’s face it. Practicing magic is boring for most people. Some magicians love it, and the work itself is part of the reward and becomes a passion, but most people feel they have better things to do with their time than sit down and drill sleight of hand. The fun part is discovering a new trick, or discussing how a trick works. Most magic forums probably 99% discussion of new tricks, reviews, reverse engineering, marketing, and arguments about which trick is the best. You have to dig very deeply to find the 1% of useful discussion about practice and rehearsal.

We can moan about this as much as we like, but it’s simple maths:

The average magician is only prepared to spend an average amount of time working on their technique. This means that half of the remaining magicians are even less prepared to practice than them!

The result: A lot of terrible sleight of hand!

The Merchant of Magic was established as a magic shop to:

Help people fall in love with magic.
Guide beginners to practice.
Help magicians design an act.
Encourage magicians to perform.

If you have ever visited the shop, or called the team by phone, you’ll already know that the team often recommends the use of gimmicks over sleight of hand, for the majority of beginners. The sleight of hand guides and tutorials are also recommended by the shop, but the focus is on quality act creation, not an artificial ideal of purity in magic. After all, that’s how ‘he who must not be named’ would probably run a magic shop.

Using gimmicks doesn’t make you some kind of ‘mud blood’. In fact, it puts you in excellent company with magicians like David Copperfield, Dante, Devant, and Dia Vernon, and pretty much every other famous magician. The greatest magicians throughout history have always been partial to using gimmicks.

Come on Dominic, it’s not as simple as that.

Maybe. I’m definitely polarizing the issue to a large extent. Few magicians choose only sleight of hand, and refuse to use gimmicks. Most magicians study sleight of hand, and also buy self working tricks or gimmicks.

My point isn’t that you should choose to abandon sleight of hand, and fill your act with gimmicked props alone. You shouldn’t choose between sleight of hand or gimmicks at all.

I’m warning that it’s very easy to get wrapped up in ‘technique’ being sold to you as the path to being a fabulous magician. It’s hard to spot because it’s not being sold to you by magic dealers, it often comes from other magicians who are also caught up in the same trap of assuming competent sleight of hand defines the quality of a magician.

I recommend that you ignore advice based on the assumption that sleight of hand is always better. There are excellent techniques, and there are terrible techniques. In just the same way, there are amazing gimmicks, and dreadful gimmicks. Forget about the method of a trick you are thinking about learning. Look at the effect, the presentation, and what actually happens from the point of view of the spectator. If those elements are awesome, then you should learn it, regardless of the mechanics involved.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section below:

10,000 Hours of Practice to Master a Magic Trick? No Thank You

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

The fastest way to practice magic tricks

Would you like to be able to practice and learn magic tricks faster than you thought possible?

There is a rule becoming a master any anything. It’s called the 10,000 hour rule. Proposed by Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, the 10,000 hour rule claims you need 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill. That’s around 10 years of consistent magic practice!

Have you got time for that?

Would you like a quicker way?

Let’s look at some ways that you can cut that time down, and still get the same results. The 10,000 hour rule refers to practice through simple repetition. Is it possible to looking at your practice technique, and introduce some smart behaviour into your routine that could cut the time needed to master a magic trick?

Practice your magic tricks just before you sleep.

Sleep is a lovely thing, and it’s very good for you, but it’s also a time when your brain processes the information that it has taken in through your day and sorts it for long term storage. Information is consolidated during sleep as memories are created and associated with previously stored information.

If you study your magic shortly before you go to bed, you should find that you retain much more of the information than if you studies earlier in the day. Bookending your day with your magic practice sessions can greatly boost the effectiveness of your practice.

Commit to formal magic practice.

What did watching all those kung-fu films teach you? The Zen masters know a thing or two about mastering skills!Instead of just going through the motions as you perform your moves, focus on every detail. Slow your practice down so you can pay attention to the process just as much as the result. Practice in the present, thinking about what you are ACTUALLY doing, not about the past or what you hope for the future. Continually ask yourself how you could adapt or change the process to improve the final result). This is a move away from mindless ‘reps’ as you examine each step of the movement and timing the technique requires.

Know your strengths.

You can get anywhere you want, with enough hard work and commitment. But some people have an easier journey than others. We can develop skill over time, but you will have a natural talent for some aspects of magic. Perhaps you are a natural actor, maybe your mind is hardwired for creativity. If you have a talent, find it and use it to your advantage.

Channel your time and effort towards magic tricks you already have a natural ability for, build a compatible set of skills to complement it. You will be practicing magic that you already have an advantage to use.

Stand of the shoulders of giants.

Pretty much everything in magic has been done before. New magic is often a variation of previous techniques with a new spin added.

The core principles are classic principles – adapted and refined from magicians that worked on designing magic tricks long ago.

Read as much as you can, and study the classics from famous magicians. Learn from other magician successes and their mistakes – You can learn faster by avoiding errors that have already occurred.

As you build up your core knowledge. Seek out new magic tricks that take the principles that you already know. The core sleights from your already mastered material, and build up a working set of material around those moves. It’s possible to do a wide range of different coin magic tricks that secretly all use the same 2 or 3 moves. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel every time you add a new magic trick.

The 10,000 hour rule isn’t set in stone. You can create shortcuts in your practice by spending time, designing a strong practice program. Take just 1% of the time you spend browsing the internet for new magic tricks, and spend it organising your practice regime. By practicing smart, you can get to the mastery of any magic technique or trick, much faster than you ever thought possible.