On Page 110 of Mnemonica, Juan Tamariz talks about the idea of revealing cards to the beat of music.
When I came across that, I was both shocked and pleased.
See, I’d had the very same idea what couldn’t have been more than a few weeks before.
I left it on the backburner for a while before I properly delved into it.
This is definitely one of my ‘wilder’ ideas, but it’s a whole lot of fun (even if you never perform it, just doing it for yourself is good enough)
At first, the effect looked like this in my head:
The spectator freely chooses a card. You then pull out a second deck—a blank deck with the names of famous songs written across the faces. He picks a song from this deck.
You pull out a portable speaker, and start playing the song. You grab a deck, and start dealing to the beat, turning a card face up everytime the beat ‘drops’. To his astonishment, the cards you turn face up are the four of a kind in the value he chose.
Whether the end result looks anything like that, I’m not sure.
I had a lot of fun either way though.
Since we’re dealing with four of a kinds, I figured we might be able to use the Quartet distances for this effect.
However, the issue was pretty apparent:
Most music pieces use a CONSISTENT number of beats, but the Quartet numbers are INCONSISTENT.
In other words, the distance between each card isn’t the same each time—which is really what we require to do this effect.
My solution?
- Start with the deck in New Deck Order.
Or rather, modified New Deck Order. See, regular NDO is:
AH-KH
AC-KC
KD-AD
KS-AS
We want to start as follows:
AH-KH
AC-KC
AD-KD
AS-KS
Now we’re ready.
- They can name any card
Once they do, cut that card to the top of the deck.
For example, if they name the 7D, we’d cut the deck so the 7D is on top.
(since this deck is technically stacked, we do this the same way we would with a stack—estimation cut, glimpse, correct, repeat.)
- Give the deck 4 out faro shuffles
- Cut three cards from the bottom to the top
You’re now ready for the fun part.
- Force a song
You’ll need to set up a second deck, with blank faces, with song names written on them.
One of these is the one we’ll be forcing. The best I’ve found so far is ‘Another One Bites The Dust’ by Queen.
You can use any force you would with a regular deck of cards for this—dribble force, riffle force, classic.
Either way, we end up with a freely chosen card and a forced song—Another One Bites The Dust
- Make the deal
Grab a phone or speaker and start blaring out Another One Bites The Dust.
I wouldn’t start dealing straight away. Give the song a minute to play, and depending on your presentational style, perhaps do some stretches and ‘warm up.’
Then, when you’re ready:
Deal in time with the iconic beat. You’ll find that there’s 3 main beats (dun, dun, dun) and then a special beat (DUN).
(I don’t know the technical terms for any of this stuff…can you tell?)
Deal facedown cards along with the 3 main beats, and then deal a face up card on the 4th beat, in time with the music.
You’ll find that, thanks to the four out faro shuffles, we’ve positioned the 7s so that there are exactly three cards between them—meaning when you do the deal, in time with the music, you’ll turn over the 7s (the exact value named.)
Alternatively, you could deal 3 facedown cards, and then deal the 4th card facedown but off to the side—and then reveal that all 4 facedown cards are the 7s.
I’m actually surprised we got a finished effect out of this—and not a half bad one either
Just goes to show, you never know if an idea will work until you really see it through.
Hope you have a lot of fun with this one (I know I did!)
I’ll be back next week with more.
Your friend,
Benji
P.S. If you’re interested, here are the number of beats between each ‘special’ beat in the following songs. I couldn’t make any of these except the first one work, but maybe you can:
Another one bites the dust – 3 between.
We will rock you – 2 between
Come together – 4 between
7 nation army – 6 between
Eye of the tiger – 9 between