Practice, Practice, Practice!

Practice is so important, and with the huge numbers of magicians that there are now as interest in our art increases, it is the one factor that can really separate the men from the boys, and you from your contemporaries.

 

First of all, do you practice already? If not, you are probably of the opinion that it is a chore, and something to be ideally avoided. In truth, there is a lot of satisfaction that comes from successful practice, especially when progress is visible.

 

At the risk of sounding like a geek, running through a trick that I love is a genuine pleasure, even just for myself. If the same is true for you, then you will actually enjoy the process of magic your magic look and feel smooth and professional.

 

If you don’t particularly enjoy practicing certain things like moves, then it’s easy enough to still do so. Simply sit yourself down in front of the TV, and practice with cards in hand. You will still need to look at what you are doing every now and then, but once you have the general mechanics of a move down, you can use repetition to secure the move into your muscle memory, and all whilst watching something on the TV. With this approach, it’s surprising how quickly you can get results, particularly when you consider that it hasn’t taken any time that you weren’t using anyway.

 

Also, when speaking of practice, a lot of people think only of the technical side of things. The moves or actions. But actually, it is important (and fun) to practice all kinds of things.

 

Try choosing two or three tricks and putting them together into a little routine. Then, practice the full routine, right from the very start, until the very end. That is, assuming they are card tricks, begin with the deck in the card box, and go right from there.

 

That way, you aren’t just practicing technique. You are practicing a routine, and applying polish to a whole product, and not just certain technical areas. You will find it easy this way to find and apply theories that can only improve your magic, such as ‘economy of motion’ (which is using as little movement as possible to achieve your tricks, which can turn an overhandled card trick to a succinct, direct piece of magic) and ‘uniformity of action’ (which means using similar looking actions throughout your routine, which helps disguise moves as there is no physical clue that one might be coming up).

 

Note that this applies to ALL tricks. Even the easy ‘self working ones’. Rushing downstairs to show a long suffering relative an exciting new product is a difficult temptation to resist, and we have all felt and done it. But to do so is to deprive your spectator of seeing the trick at its best, and you of the satisfaction of nailing the performance, which is unlikely to happen first time.

 

Practicing in this way also avoids problems later on - people are less likely to catch you out or see a move if you have worked it in. That then means that you and your spectators can just get on with enjoying the routines.

 

Later on, you can practice other sets, perhaps comprising of three tricks with a borrowed shuffled pack, and then another, and then another. This slowly but surely builds you up muscle memory for a huge repertoire of tricks. A well known magician who did this was Michael Skinner, who was famous for being able to perform, to a professional standard, an absurd amount of routines.

 

Here is a cool way to practice this kind of thing. Get yourself a blank deck, or a stack of business cards, something like that, and write down the tricks you want to practice on them. Shuffle them out, pick them out and random, and go through that trick. Later on, the cards could each have little routines of them, combinations of two or three tricks.

 

Finally, I would like to point out that all tricks should be practiced, and so should all performances. Andi Gladwin made a great point to me a while back, while we were discussing the amount of magic that gets uploaded to youtube that is, frankly, crap. Andi said that people should practice as if their ‘views’ were live audience members. For example, if you had a show for 1000 people live, would you practice? I certainly hope so, and if you didn’t, you could hardly expect it to be successful. So why would you do the same for 1000 on the internet?

 

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed reading, and as always, if you have any comments or questions, just let us know

 

Until next time (if not before…)

Liam Montier for dudethatscoolmagic.co.uk

 

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