I used to enjoy magic tutorials. I used to get home from school and be excited to watch the explanation for the latest move or gimmick that I invested in. I felt like I was actually consuming tons of useful information. Maybe I was. Now, I disdain seeing a runtime for a tutorial over an hour. I have a life to lead, friends to see, a girlfriend to date. I understand if it’s for a sleight. You want multiple angles, and to be taught in-depth. The more time you take to learn how to do the sleight correctly, the less time you have to spend on finding those subtleties and solving those problems with the move yourself. It’s like that cheesy quote often misattributed to Abe Lincoln: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Okay. Sleight of hand aside. This rant is for those tutorials with gimmicks, apps, etc. Things that (unlike sleight of hand) don’t take decades to master. A lot of the time, the tutorial gives you every possibility with the trick or gimmick. With hours and hours of instruction on each and every possibility or variation. I just want to be able to do what was shown on the trailer. Show me how to do that. As for the rest of it, leave the creativity to us! That’s the fun in buying and performing magic. Making it your own. It’s almost like they have no faith in our creative abilities at all. Almost every single release is “groundbreaking” and “revolutionary”, and it’s almost always a “full on system”. How about teach the method and then let it speak for itself?

Jeff Prace, from Plainsight Magic? Amazing. Short, concise, and gets to the point. Any of his tutorials are what I think should be the gold standard. Plus, they’re public viewing! You get to watch them before you choose to buy anything (a topic for another day). I don’t care to know what you were eating when you came up with the trick, or where you were when the call from Murphy’s came (no one does by the way).

This is how tutorials should be formatted: First things first, don’t talk about it, just tell me how to do it. Then, have optional “History and Credits”. (Optional to view, not optional to include.) Keep the tutorials as short as possible. Leave coming up with the presentation to the viewer (unless it’s vital to the method). Have it time stamped so it’s easy to skip through.

Even better? Get rid of video downloads and bring back single page PDFs. I actually really like those small leaflets that used to come with tricks. It’s faster (and easier) to read through a page of writing than it is to sit through 9 hours of Craig Petty nattering on about the eighteenth use for his gimmicked deck. In fact, apparently the Craig Petty tutorials would be twice as long if there wasn’t someone there to quality check the sheer amount of shit thrown at the wall.¹ I get that there are things that are easier to convey via video. Teaching sleight of hand moves via over the shoulder footage is a godsend. I get that. However, I think there are some gimmicks and items that could have a single PDF explanation, easily.

1. Thanks for the anecdote, Lisbeth. ↩︎