What's the Worst Thing About: Nate Staniforth's Making Tricks Into Magic Course
/A couple months ago I offered people a way to advertise their product on this site for free. And that was for them to send me what they were offering and then I would write a post documenting what I felt were the worst things about that product. (I gave my rationale for this in that post.) Oddly enough, this didn’t turn out to be a super popular idea with people who were putting out magic products.
But now we have our first person willing to take me up on the offer, and that is Nate Staniforth with his online workshop, Making Tricks into Magic.
This is a two-hour online course teaching a series of techniques (and two tricks) for more powerful magic. This is based on Nate’s many years of professional performing.
The course is nicely put together and easy to navigate through. What I appreciate is that there isn’t unnecessary rambling. He gets to the point quickly in each “chapter” of the course. He’s an engaging speaker who has clearly given these things a lot of thought. I like both tricks he teaches (make sure you watch until the end of the course to get some upgrades on the second trick which should make it much stronger). I think anyone who is performing or considering performing professionally will find at least a couple concepts here which should have a positive impact on their magic. And for 50-ish bucks, that seems definitely worth it for the working pro.
Nate and I have some similar philosophies in regards to our approach towards, and our goals for magic. So if you like this site and you’re curious about a professional’s approach to this sort of thing, then I would recommend you pick up the project.
Technically you don’t need to be a professional magician. I think his ideas translate pretty well across the board, regardless of your performing environment. But that is the background that he’s bringing to the this.
Yes, but what are the worst things about this project?
I’ll give you three.
If you’re not good at extrapolating, you might find things to be a little too succinct. I appreciated the fact that everything was broken down into “chapters” that only lasted a few minutes each, but I would bet there are some people who would want things explained in more detail.
In a similar vein, I think there needs to be more tricks incorporated in the course. Yes, yes, I know, we all have more tricks than we could possibly need. But the way to explain magic theory is through the language of tricks. Even if Nate didn’t want to get into teaching and explaining a bunch of different tricks (I get that), I think he could have used more tricks as examples to help demonstrate his theories. So he wouldn’t even have to teach them, necessarily. Use a standard trick or standard performance and break it down and rebuild it using the techniques described in the course.
This picture…
For the next week, Nate is offering a 10% discount for people who use the code jerxreaders. I told him if I ended up really hating the project I wouldn’t mention the discount code as that would have been a little weird. “Hey, this is shit… And here’s 10% off that shit!” But that’s not the case here.
If you have a new product or project and you’d like me to tell people the worst parts about it, you can read about how to do that here.