The first time I tried to add music to one of my routines, I spent an entire evening in a hotel room in Salzburg scrolling through playlists and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
I had a routine I liked. I had been performing it at corporate events for a few months, always with patter, always as a talking piece. It worked fine. The audience responded. But I had been reading Scott Alexander’s notes on building a stand-up show, and his argument about musical pieces kept nagging at me. In a forty-five-minute talking act, Alexander writes, the audience needs breaks from processing words. Two or three silent routines set to music give both the audience and the performer a welcome change of pace. The variety itself becomes a production element.
So I decided to convert one of my routines from a talking piece to a musical piece. I opened Spotify on my laptop, put the props on the hotel room desk, and stared at the screen. Where do you even start?
I tried searching by mood. “Dramatic instrumental music.” The results were overwhelming. Hundreds of tracks, all technically fitting the search criteria, none of them obviously right. I listened to thirty seconds of each, tried to imagine my routine playing underneath, and felt nothing click. After two hours, I had a headache and a growing suspicion that pairing music with effects was one of those skills that required an innate sense I did not possess.
It was only later, when I returned to Alexander’s notes more carefully, that I realized he describes not one but two distinct approaches to this problem. And the reason I had failed that evening in Salzburg was that I had been using neither of them properly.
The Analytical List Approach
The first method Alexander describes is systematic and deliberate. You make two lists. On one side, you write down songs you genuinely like — songs that move you, excite you, make you feel something when you hear them. Not songs you think would work for magic. Songs you actually enjoy as a person.
On the other side, you write down the effects in your repertoire. All of them. The talking pieces, the visual pieces, the audience participation routines, the close-up effects you are adapting for stage. Everything.
Then you start drawing lines between the two lists. Not based on logic. Based on feeling. Does the energy of this song match the energy of that effect? Does the emotional arc of the music — the build, the crescendo, the resolution — mirror the dramatic arc of the routine? Does the lyrical content, if there are lyrics, connect thematically with what the audience is seeing?
What I love about this approach is that it starts from authenticity. You are not searching for “good magic music.” You are starting from music you already have an emotional connection to, and then asking whether that connection can extend to your performance material.
When I finally sat down and made my two lists, the exercise took about twenty minutes. I wrote down fifteen songs on one side and eight effects on the other. Almost immediately, I saw connections I had missed during my aimless scrolling session. A particular piece of music I had been listening to on repeat during long drives between consulting clients had an emotional build that perfectly matched the escalating impossibility of one of my mentalism presentations. The timing was not exact — it never is on the first attempt — but the feeling was right. The energy matched.
That connection became the starting point for one of the strongest musical pieces in my current set. But it would never have emerged from searching Spotify by keyword. It emerged because I started with music I already loved and asked what it reminded me of.
The Improvisational Play Approach
The second method Alexander describes is almost the opposite of the first. Instead of analyzing lists, you put on music and improvise with props.
You do not have a specific routine in mind. You do not have a specific effect you are trying to match. You simply pick up whatever props are at hand, start a playlist — any playlist, the more diverse the better — and let your hands move. Let your mind wander. See what connections emerge between what you are hearing and what you are doing with your hands.
This approach is intuitive, messy, and occasionally embarrassing if someone walks in on you. I have done it in hotel rooms late at night, standing at the desk with a deck of cards or a set of props, headphones on, just moving to the music and seeing what happens. Most of what happens is nothing. The music plays, the hands move, and no connection sparks. But every once in a while, something clicks. A beat in the music lines up with a natural pause in a sequence. A lyrical phrase coincides with the moment of revelation. A change in musical energy — from verse to chorus, from quiet to loud — matches a shift in the routine that you had never noticed could be a dramatic turning point.
These moments of alignment are not planned. They are discovered. And they feel different from the connections you find through the analytical approach. The list method produces pairings that are intellectually satisfying — you can explain why the music and the effect fit together, and the explanation makes sense. The improvisational method produces pairings that are emotionally surprising — you cannot always explain why they work, but they make you feel something that the routine alone did not.
I discovered one of my favorite musical pairings this way. I was in a hotel room in Linz, playing around with a visual effect while listening to a playlist that had nothing to do with magic. A track came on that I would never have considered as performance music. It was the wrong genre, the wrong tempo, the wrong everything according to any rational analysis. But the way the music swelled at a particular moment lined up perfectly with the visual climax of the effect, and the contrast between the unexpected musical style and the visual impossibility created something that felt genuinely new.
I would never have found that pairing through the list method. The analytical part of my brain would have filtered that song out immediately. It was too unusual, too far from what I thought magic music should sound like. But in the improvisational space, where I was not filtering, where I was just playing and listening, the connection revealed itself.
Why Both Methods Are Necessary
Here is what I have come to understand after experimenting with both approaches over the past couple of years: the two methods serve different purposes, and the strongest musical pairings often emerge from using them in sequence.
The analytical list approach is excellent for finding solid, reliable pairings. These are pairings where the music and the effect share an obvious emotional or thematic connection, where the audience will feel the fit intuitively, and where the combination will work consistently across different venues and audiences. These pairings form the backbone of a musical repertoire. They are dependable. They work.
The improvisational play approach is excellent for finding surprising, distinctive pairings. These are pairings that the audience would never expect, that create a tonal contrast or an emotional texture that sets your performance apart from anyone else doing a similar effect. These pairings are riskier — they might not work for every audience, and they require more confidence in performance because you cannot lean on the obvious connection between music and magic. But when they work, they create moments that audiences remember specifically and distinctly.
My workflow now looks like this. When I am developing a new routine that I want to set to music, I start with the list method. I look at the songs I am currently listening to, the music that is already in my life, and I ask which of those songs shares emotional DNA with the routine I am building. This usually gives me two or three candidates that I can test in rehearsal.
Then, separately, I spend time in the improvisational space. Not trying to find music for that specific routine, but just playing with props while listening to diverse music. If something unexpected clicks — and it does not always — I file it away. Sometimes these improvisational discoveries become the starting point for entirely new routines. Sometimes they replace the solid-but-predictable pairing I found through the list method with something more distinctive.
The Feeling Test
Dan Harlan, in his lecture on magic as theatre, talks about crossing genres freely when selecting music — whatever fits the mood. He mentions starting with obvious keyword searches but then moving beyond the obvious to find iconic songs that create unexpected connections. The principle underneath both of his suggestions and Alexander’s two methods is the same: the right music for an effect is not determined by genre or tempo or any objective musical quality. It is determined by feeling.
The right song makes you feel something when you hear it alongside the effect. Not think something. Feel something. If you are analyzing whether the music works and you cannot tell, it does not work. The right pairing announces itself. You hear the music while performing the routine and something shifts in your chest or your gut. The combination produces an emotional response that neither element produces alone.
This is what I could not find during that first frustrating evening in Salzburg. I was searching for the right music with my head — analyzing genres, matching tempos, evaluating production quality. I was not listening with my body. I was not asking whether the music made me feel something when I paired it with the effect. I was asking whether it logically fit, which is the wrong question entirely.
When the Music Changes the Magic
Hans Christian Andersen wrote, “Where words fail, music speaks.” Alexander quotes this line, and it captures something essential about why musical pieces deserve a place in every performing magician’s repertoire.
There are effects that work well as talking pieces but transform into something genuinely moving when the words are removed and music takes their place. Without words to process, the audience watches more closely. Without explanations, they feel more deeply. The music provides emotional context, but in a way that is less directive and more personal than patter. Each audience member fills the silence with their own response.
I have one routine that I performed as a talking piece for almost a year before converting it to a musical piece. The reactions were always good. People enjoyed it. But after I found the right music and stripped away the patter, the reactions changed in quality. People did not just enjoy it. They were moved by it. Something about the combination of visual impossibility and emotional music, without the mediating layer of words, created an experience that went deeper than entertainment.
That transformation would not have happened if I had not been willing to try both approaches to finding music, to be systematic when the moment called for analysis and playful when the moment called for intuition.
The right music is out there for every routine in your repertoire. You just need two different sets of ears to find it.