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One move has been driving me mad for ages. I was told "keep practicing and you'll get it". I kept practicing and it never worked, no matter how much I tried! Then a guy I was talking to over the weekend noticed something wrong with one finger position and - hey! - it's easy!

My point is that people say "you'll get it right if you keep practicing" and often that is the case, but as this example shows sometimes practice ISN'T the answer. It's only worth practicing if your technique is right in the first place and if it isn't the practice is a waste of time - because you're practicing the wrong thing!

RANT OVER!

Good point, but surely the point of actual practice is to ensure things like finger positioning etc. are right in the first place, and to perhaps experiment with different positions to find what is right for you? Just repeating the move again and again isn't really practice, its more like mimicking blindly.

Eh yeah, practice only works if you're practicing it properly!!! There's no point doing 6 million repetitions if you aren't getting it right!

come on, you have to tell us the move you had trouble with..

go on....

Yeah, go on, do tell... it was The Glide, wasn't it...

Farlsborough wrote:Yeah, go on, do tell... it was The Glide, wasn't it...

BAH!!! (Although I do hate the glide for some reason!)

It was the Truffle Shuffle.

The glide is underrated massively. Even with dozens of sleights at my fingertips, some supposedly "Impossible," sometimes it's the glide that causes wonders.

I'll take Design for Laughter over a large majority of effects I read these days.

TheStoner wrote:It was the Truffle Shuffle.

The "truffle shuffle"? Admit it, you just made that up...

My Tae Kwon Do teach would always say "Practice never makes perfect. You can practice sloppily all you want and you'll never get any better. Perfect Practice is necessary to make it perfect." (An innuendo bingo goldmine if you ask me.)

Truffle ' Sherry ' Shuffle

I've said many times that practice does not make perfect - Perfect practice makes perfect. Bas practice makes bad.

This highlights the importance of having correct instruction and a defined practice system. If you learn poor technique early on it becomes almost impossible to correct that later. However, if you take the time to make sure that your technique is correct at the start (and that's _not_ just finger placement) then you will have a good foundation.

The first step is to _understand_ what you are doing. If you blindly go through the actions with little or no understanding you will find it hard to fine tune the errors away. If you know _why_ you are doing a particular action it becomes so much easier to tweak that action to get it right.

Way too tired to go into much detail on this.

Take care, Ian

Farlsborough wrote:

TheStoner wrote:It was the Truffle Shuffle.

The "truffle shuffle"? Admit it, you just made that up...

No way dude. It's a very cool false off-table riffle shuffle. It's on the Dan & Dave Buck site.

Ooh, I will look into that then. I could do with a false in the hands riffle shuffle, having been delighted with discovering what I believe is an "Erdnase Shuffle" recently (tabled false RS) - though I was a little annoyed at how simple and obvious it is and wish I'd just thought of it earlier!

It is true that you practice, and practice right for that matter, but you've got to remember to practice more than just the sleight of hand; use a mirror, camera, or something to make sure that you aren't be obvious, and thus give away the secret.

The important distinction in this case is surely the difference between practise and repetition.

As is stated above, there is more to practise than doing something over and over again. If you are learning a sleight the best thing to do is go through it very slowly, inch by inch, training the muscles in your hand what every move feels like, and gradually work it up to performance speed. If something goes wrong, instead of just doing it again and hoping, try and work out why it didn't work - if you can't identify that, you can't stop it going wrong again.