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Professional magicians are often asked ‘How did you learn magic?’ This article explains how you can get started learning magic tricks.

People want to learn magic for different reasons. Some just want to do it for their personal enjoyment, while others want to take it really seriously and become a professional magician. Others just want an impressive magic trick to show their friends or impress the ladies!

How you go about learning magic depends on your reasons are for doing it.

To become a professional magician and learn all the skillful magical techniques, all the sleight of hand, takes time - you need to immerse yourself in magic. Watch as much magic on TV as you can, watch instructional videos, read magic books, find magic videos and instructions on the internet and talk to other magicians (join a magic club or society).

Of course, many people want something they can perform straight away. Look in your local library or old shops for books on magic. A lot of the magic books you will find in these places will be for people starting to learn magic. An important thing to remember is not to dismiss magic tricks that are easy to do - it is the presentation that counts. Experienced magicians know that the presentation of a trick requires as much practice (in fact more) as the moves and sleights needed.

You can also buy magic tricks, apparatus that do a lot of the work for you. A few words of caution though:

• Often the advertising blurb will say ’self working’ or ‘requires no skill’ - this is rarely, if ever, true. What this means is that the trick doesn’t require a special ’sleight’ or move. All tricks require practice and familiarity to be performed well.
• Magic tricks can be expensive because you pay for the secret as well as the physical item (and sometimes you wonder if the secret is worth it!)
• After you’ve performed your expensive new card trick, what happens next? Do you put that deck of cards away carefully and take out another? Hmmm, that doesn’t look like magic… Tricks that you buy tend to be good for one performance to one audience. If the trick was any good, and if you are in an informal situation, your audience is going to want more!

Probably the best magical apparatus you can buy are coin tricks. Coins are common objects that everybody carries. It’s not going to look strange if you take some change out of your pocket and say ‘Hey everyone, watch this…’. Classic coin tricks such as Coin Unique and Skotch and Soda are available from most magic shops, easy to do and look great. You can often perform more than one effect with them and build up a routine.

Remember, even though magic tricks that you buy from a shop may be easy to do, you still have to practice the routine and presentation until they are perfect before performing them.

Here are a couple of websites that offer more advice on getting into magic:

• Beginners’ Corner at the magic talk forum.
• Five Steps For Getting Started in Magic on the About.com site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Articles, Magic Styles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.