Welcome back to another episode of Cutting the Distance podcast. I'm Dirk Durham and it is August first, and you know what that means. We have thirty one days until September. I don't know if anybody else is counting those days besides me, but man, this is the time of year that I get kind of excited. You can almost it's been super hot and you can almost kind of feel a change in August, especially the further along we get.
Usually by the fifteenth they start feeling those changes. The mornings are a little cooler, the air is a little fresher, you get maybe a little more of a crisp. You can tell we're on the cusp of entering fall. As hot as it's been, and it's been dry and hot across the west here. I think we're all probably welcoming those kind of mornings definitely. So we have thirty one days to finalize our preparations. Are we ready where you're at on your fitness goals? So I really really like
to ramp my fitness stuff up in August. Stay pretty active all summer, but in August I'm really going to get more granular on my day to day fitness. I need to be hiking the hills, do some bicycle work, taking the dog for a walk around the neighborhood, whatever
I can do to get steps in every day. Here in the Tresure Valley, we have the Woisey Foothills which have a really great trail system, and there's some really steep ones and there's some really mild ones, but you can really get in some good, good hikes in there. So I really like to start hiking those a lot more often in August, so that way kind of prepared to climb mountains and chase elk and the good part, I guess then the bad part is those foothills. There's
no trees, there's no shade, it's just hot. So unless you get up super early in the morning and beat the heat, which I never can seem to do. I'm not an early riser, so I'm usually suffering in the heat. But it's good because if I'm used to dealing with hot sun and sweat and discomfort during those hikes, then it's gonna acclimate me to do in the same thing during September when the mornings are cool. So that's a great way to fulfill my fitness goal to do some.
I also like to do some dumb bell workouts. You know, I'm doing curls for the curls, as they say, I'm doing a lot of shoulder stuff. I just want to be able to be strong and that way, when my pat goes on my back, I won't get fatigued all September. And that kind of goes along with your your you're hiking, right, you're rocky. Put on some put a put your pack on. Put a little weight down there, you know, twenty twenty pounds at the beginning, and as as season gets approaches,
puts put a pretty good load in it. Shooting your bow, that's that's paramount. At this point of summer, we should have started. If you haven't, you should have probably started that a couple of months ago. But shooting, you know, a pretty dedicated, uh schedule of shooting. I like to shoot in the mornings before it gets gets warm here, before I start my day, shoot shoot a few rounds. I'm not a big believer in shooting one hundred arrows
a day like some people. I feel like high quality, shorter rounds, shorter amount of reps works better for me. That way, I can just focus on all the fundamentals and focusing on hunting the bow or holding the bow. I'm I'm focusing on releasing the arrow correctly. I'm just working on all the muscle memory of doing it right. And when I start getting fatigued, then that's when things
start slipping. My group starts slipping. I start practicing bad habits, so I like to I like to practice good habits. And acquiring gear. Seems like once you hit the fourth of July, everybody starts getting pretty pretty ramped up on buying their gear, you know, for hunting season, whether it's new new hunting gear or freeze dried meals or elk calls or what have you. Then yeah, it's time get
that stuff ordered. If you're wearing closed or boots, get those ordered up right away or bought from your local retailer that way, have time that's like, ah, these don't fit quite right, you can always return them, get them, get the right size that way. Come September, it's all good. You don't have to worry about waiting on that stuff to get shipped out right away to you, or or maybe they're not in stock in your local retailer. And then, last, but not least, learn and a call that you know.
I always recommend starting months in advance, a September. That way comes September, you have really a really good grasp on calling and you feel really confident. But if you haven't done that, not to worry. I mean we can. We still have time, but you don't have to be dedicated. You have to spend some time here. We're going to have to do you know, every day, practice every day.
It doesn't have to be hours a day, but that ten fifteen minutes a day will let you crush that learning curve on your commutant, on the way to work, maybe when you get home, out in the garage or somewhere where you're not annoying the rest of the family. I mean, it's kind of tough to call it home sometimes when you have a family, because everybody doesn't appreciate
those loud bugles like a lot of us do. But this is going to kick off our series learn to Call Elk, and we're going to talk about fundamentals first, cow calls and bugles, and now, whether you're a season vet or a beginner, I got you. I always like to tell people to practice the fundamentals first. If you've been calling for a long time. If you practice these fundamentals, it will definitely help you improve your your game. It
will help you make your calls a lot more realistic. Now, I always like to say, you want to crawl before you walk, right. We want to build muscle memory, and we want our tongue and our our internal diaphragm to know how much how much pressure to put, how much air to blow, how much tongue pressure to blow every single time we put that call in our mouth. That way we build confidence to when it comes time to blow it in the elk woods, then you know what's
going to come out of your mouth. Right. If you haven't practiced much, sometimes it's like, Okay, I'm gonna try to make this certain call, and you go to make it and it's like, oh, I didn't come out like I anticipated, And that's just lack of practice. So tuning up your calls every day for ten to fifteen minutes will definitely take that guess work out. But crawling before you walk has to do with if you're a new caller,
don't just open a package. If you never tried to call a bugle before, don't just open the package and throw the read in your mouth and try to rip a big bugle because I promise you it probably won't sound anything like an elk. Then that can be kind of discouraging and be like, oh man, wow, that was crazy. I don't know if you know I can do this elk call and stuff. So get your diaphragm, put it
in your mouth. If you're using a phelps Amp call, we have the little silver dome on top of our diaphragms. And you want to put that that silver dome on top towards the roof of your mouth. And you want to put the latex, the flat, the flat into the call, not the round it in, but the flat into the call. You want to put that towards your teeth, and you want to put that up in your in your mouth there and get it on your tongue. That don would put it too far back because that's where that gag
reflex will come in. And you get it too far back, you'll you'll you'll start gagging. Uh. And if you get it too far forward, a lot of folks have a problem with a tickle. It'll tickle their tongue. So you try to find that kind of a happy place in the in the middle of your tongue, where your tongue feels the strongest. Now, I like to picture having a grape on my tongue, and if I were to push pressure with my tongue on that grape and I want to crush it, I'm going to put that grape and
the strongest part of my tongue. So if you put that drape too far forward, you just don't have you just don't have any leverage. It doesn't seem like you're the tip of your tongues as strong as right in the middle. You put it too far back there again, it's not very strong. So find that strong part right in the middle that you feel like you can push the best pressure. And that's that's where that that diaphragm
is gonna want to sit. And then you want to you want to push it hard against the roof of your mouth, and you want to seal off all the air. You want to exert a little bit of air pressure. Now, we're not going to try to push so much pressure that we're trying to like air up a tire with our mouth. We're just trying to push enough pressure to where how much air would you blow If you're trying to just blow some air through like a straw for instance,
like a drink straw. It's not a huge amount of air, but you don't want to push push a little bit of air and you want to be able to seal that air off. So seal it off with your tongue and also around the sides of your teeth and the sides you're the of your of your cheeks. Don't let it escape around those places. Now, once you have things sealed off, you want to relax your tongue just ever so slightly, and if you can. Some of us have a very articulate tongue where you can, like you can
roll it up like a leaf. You can. You can control how much pressure or strength you put into things depending on what part of your tongue you're using. So I like to try to, like relax if I can that middle part of my tongue to where the air would pass between my tongue and that latex. I'm gonna relax just enough to let a little tiny bit of air go across that late tex and it's gonna make a tiny little noise. It's gonna make a little noise like a like a mosquito. And it's gonna sound something
like this. Now I'm not pushing lots of air like I said, you know, like we're just we're just getting some air flowing. It doesn't have to be loud, but I just want to make that first initial noise. And at first you may may not get that high note. You may get a note like this. If you're getting a little a lower pitch note, that means you're not pushing hard enough with your tongue. Apply more pressure, and apply more pressure until you can raise the octaves of
that sound to this an experiment. You notice how I went from low to super high to a little lower. You're just gonna have to to find that right pressure. And this is a little bit difficult the beginning because your tongue's never done this before, or maybe if your seasoned vet, this is not how you normally typically do it. But if you can find that high note every time you put your diaphragm in your mouth, then later when you try to bugle, it's going to be easier to
hit that high note. Because a lot of people struggle with hitting that high note. You know, it seems like some folks just they can't get that high note. That high ringing note, which is what a lot of elk really respond to, especially when you're going to challenge them. So figuring this out right from the beginning will help you later on. So once you find that note, then we want to practice that mount. Now this is boring, and this is not sexy. That's not these big sexy,
badass bugles. It's like, oh wow, you may press your friends with right, this is just kind of annoying. And little kids do this like you had a kid a diaphragm, and before you know it, that kid's running around making all sorts of crazy noises, annoying, annoying you. Pretty soon they're trying to talk like a Donald ductor talking like
whatever they can with this stupid read in their mouth. Right, that's why kids aren't pick this up so quickly, because as adults, we're a little bit stoic, right, we don't really typically act like that or do those kind of things. And unless your baby a little bit of a character and like to mess with people, But experiment, find the
boundaries of that diaphragm. You know, with just a little pressure, just barely touching your tongue to that diaphragm, you can get that really low note, and that really high note takes a lot more pressure. So from the low to the high, play with it. Try to make all sorts of weird noises. Just finding the boundaries that this call has will help out. It's like, Okay, I'm starting to see how this thing works, right, light time pressure, low notes,
hard tongue pressure, high note. So practice that mosquito noise and it's gonna be boring. So I always say, take a deep breath, let that air start seeping out, and then hold that same note for the length that you have a breath. And you know, towards the end it's going to get weird because you're fighting for air number one, number two, the air pressure. You're running out of air pressure air volume, so you're gonna have to change how hard you're pushing that air. And we're not gonna want
to push the air with our lungs. We're trying to push this with our internal diaphragm b' bracing our core tight and using our internal diaphragm to push air across that read or diaphragm. So that may take a little little more tongue pressure, a little less tongue pressure, or a little more push on air pressure. But as you as you play with it, you'll under you'll understand it, and pretty soon your brain, your tongue, here's your core.
All that stuff's gonna start working together. They know their job at this point. That's where that muscle memory comes in. So practice that that mosquito noise until every time you put that diaphragm in your mouth, you've got it. You know, there's no hesitation. Just like what I did. I don't have to search for the note. It just I put it in and my tongue knows exactly how hard to push. My diaphragm knows how much air to push across the reed,
and everything comes out perfect. Now once you get that down, Now we want to learn variance, and you know, from the high notes to the low notes. So I always tell people practice the siren sound. So it's going to sound like a siren. So you're gonna start at the low sound, barely any tongue pressure. You're gonna push, push, push, until you get that up to that mosquito sound, hold it and then let it slide back down the other
side to that low note. And if there's a lot of work to be done, by your core here, by your internal diaphragm. There's a lot of work to be done if you brace up and just really try to articulate those those note changes smoothly all the way up all the way down. That's that's where the key of
controlling your elk bugles comes from. So this is where the old old veterans elk collors could maybe use a little help if they don't have perfect el calls already, because some of us, as we climb those notes, our diaphragm may may crack or pop, it may break that sound, and then it'll kind of take back off. So this is where we practice that to get those really really smooth transitions, and it's gonna sound something like this. M
m hmmm mm hmmmmmmmmm. Start out slow in the beginning, and that once you get better at going up and down that staircase, then you can speed up your sirens sound. You notice mine kind of broke that little cracking noise right. I tried to rush it a little too quick. So let the call climb. Brace your brace your core, let it climb, and then let it descend. Just mood transitions top to bottom, top to bottom, top to bottom, it's boring,
it's a weird noise. And but the great part about it is you can practice these two exercise mosquito and siren in the comfort of your car on the way to work, and people won't look at you weird like when you're practicing with a bugle. So, now, how do these relate to calls? Right? Well, those are kind of fundamental sounds to call. So that mosquito noise we can put that to work in a cow call. We can put that to work in a locator bugle. The siren, we put that to work in a standard full bugle.
So we're taking that that mosquito noise to a cal call. Now, so hit that high note, that mosquito noise. You hit that high note and then just kind of relax your tongue real slow and just let it and just let it fall off the back notes there. Just let it gonna go slow. And then as it goes lower and lower on the note scales, as you get to to where your your tongue is barely touching that call, you know, the notes will get a lot deeper. So it's gonna
sound something like this. So practicing that now we can shorten that up. It doesn't really sound like a cow call. Just be by the speed and the tempo of the call. But it's the same notes. So as we speed that up, so we don't we don't linger so long at the high note, we don't linger so long in the no Lo note. We just let it kind of. We can't make that that cow call, and it's gonna sound like this, And we want to do this with just light light
air pressure. Right, we're trying to make cow calls right now that are relaxed, that that aren't alarming, that aren't excited. We're just trying to make those super sweet, mature cow calls. Now, the more you let your tongue linger on the low side on those lower notes, the more mature it's going to sound. The less you let it linger on the low side, it's going to sound more like a calf. So here's a demonstration. That's a mature cow just a little bit of high note, but a little bit more
low note. It lingered a little longer on that low note. Now the calf call is going to be slightly different. We're just gonna give a little bit more of that high note and we're just not even going to give the low note, we're staying that higher octave, so we're not loosening our tongue all the way up. And calf calls they take even less air pressure than the cow
calls because the call is a lot longer. So this is kind of a delicate procedure, and at first it'll probably be a little bit tough to control that air pressure because we'll tend to, like a lot of folks, really have to work on that air pressure control a lot in the beginning, and tongue control, of course, but getting those to work at the right time together, it does take some work. That's why back to that whole mosquito the siren, we're learning that tongue control long before
we're trying to learn how to make a call. That way, it makes this a lot easier and you can make a lot more realistic kind of sounds. Now, if your calls are kind of harsh or squeaky like this, you may be tensing up your mouth too much. Oftentimes it's almost the human nature to kind of like brace your mouth, like your cheeks and every part of your mouth to make this call. And when you do that, it'll make a squeaky or a kind of a less calming sound of a call. So my cheeks are relaxed. The only
thing that's flexing is my tongue. Okay. And as I go from the top the high note to the low note on that cow call, I might even be slightly relaxing my jaw, dropping my jaw down a little bit. So experiment with that to see how it suit you. I know some guys will drop their jaw and let a lot and let them create a larger cavity inside their mouth for the sound to resonate out of. And
they just do it all with tongue work. That takes a lot of takes a lot of strength in your tongue and a lot of practice and discipline and in practicing in front of a mirror. But just to start out, I wouldn't try to open your jaw too much. I would just kind of let your tongue do most of the work, and then slightly as you hit that lower note, just slightly let your jaw relax. Now, Bugles, that's the one everybody likes to do, right. Cow calls calend caf
calls are deadly. There's a lot of folks that love to use cow and CAF calls to call in bulls. I like to couple my calend CAF calls with bugles. Whatever camp you're in, bugling is very effective. Now maybe you don't maybe you don't finish your elk with bugles, but you get them started right. You're trying to locate a ball from a long distance. Bugles are loud. You're just trying to get that bold to sound off to you. So it's important to bugle. If you want to call elk,
you got to learn how to bugle elk. So for bugles, we're going to go right back to our good friends Mosquito and Siren. First things first, though, when you bugle, I always recommend to practice with a tube. You can definitely practice without one, but everything you learn without the tube changes when you put a tube to your mouth.
I've conducted a lot of training courses with folks hands on in person when we learn bugles, and if we practice too much with how to bugle, then when they put the bugle to their lips, it's like something changes, and then everything that their tongue and diaphragm and brain new, it's all changed all about the window. Now we have to relearn, so I like to recommend make sure you practice your bugles with a tube. And also they're just gonna sound better. And all tubes are not created equal.
You know, the old vacuum cleaner style that everybody grew up using back in the eighties, and even today some people still prefer those kinds. Those sound good, but they don't always sound as good as possible. I know hunters who have been using those for a long time, and you hand them like a new, newer style tube, the ones that look like a baseball bat. Right here at Phelps, we have the Renegade, we have the Unleashed, we have the Unleashed V two, we have the metal Tube, we
have the Unrivaled. We've got a lot of different tubes, but they're not those flexible vacuum cleaner style tubes. But when you give somebody that's been bugle in their whole life with one of those flexible tube styles, you give them one of these larger bat style tubes, it's an immediate improvement. And what I mean by that it sounds more crystal clear. It's the back pressure is better to where as they put air pressure into the tube, not
all of it leaks out. The opposite end, and it lets them build those notes up of the octaves a lot easier without without putting pushing so so hard and pushing so much air pressure in there. So it kind of retains some of that air pressure. So it can make a okay or decent collar into a great collar just by switching tubes. That's just kind of a little pro tip. So back to learning how to bugle. So our good old friend Mosquito. Right, so we're gonna for
a locator bugle. You just hit that high note, you hold it for a while, then, just like the calcal, you drop it off the backside. But this time, instead of being slow and lazy with the way it comes off the back end, what we're going to do is come off pretty quickly, abruptly, and then we're gonna add our voice. We're gonna inflect our voice to it, and it's gonna sound like somebody punched us in the gut. Now we're not gonna growl like a bear. We're not
gonna do that. We're gonna take a punch of the gut because that adds just the right amount of bass in there that basse resonates in the tube and it just sounds good, and it doesn't sound too grally if you if you growl too much, it just doesn't sound quite right. But if you just add that to the end, then it will it'll sound a lot better. So practice this by starting out with your siren and then drop it off abruptly and then a punch to the gut.
Now that didn't really sound like much like a no bugle at all, but if we do it into a tube, it's gonna sound a lot better. Sounds way better, and you can feel that base with inside the tube, so you get good feedback whether it's audibly, and you can actually feel that bass in the tube. So your hand picks that up and it say, okay, yeah, that felt right,
sounded right. I like it, So practice that. And the transition from that mosquito noise down to the to the punch to the gut can sometimes be challenging for people. So it's sometimes it's really hard for people to blend those together. So I'll do this in slow motion, uh slow audio motion, I guess so, because there is kind of a disconnect from the bugle to or from the mosquito noise to that to that punch to the gut. H yeah. H. So some people have to break it down.
They'll have to do the mosquito noise and then let their brain reset and then go oh at the end. So even if you have to do that, that's okay because as you do that over and over and over again, pretty soon you can connect the two a lot quicker to where it sounds like this. H Okay, that's your locator bugle. Now to do a fold bugle. That's where you start at the bottom, take it to the top note, hold it for a little bit, and then drop off the backside. Now that's where gonna where we're gonna use
our old friend siren. Right, so in the beginning, when that that diaphragm is barely touching your tongue, you're getting that first loan note. We're gonna inflect your voice. Now again, we're not gonna growl hard like this. We're gonna do more of a like like you're clearing your throat. Like let's say, add some flem in your throat, or you know, you get a little bit sick, or you got a frog in your throat. Per se, it'd be almost like
clearing your throat. So it's not like an ought like a you're using your voice to growl, You're just you're just clearing your throat. So it's more just like the the you're tightening your throat to make that noise versus using your vocal cords. Right, we don't want to use overuse the vocal cords because then it kind of overdoes it. And then once you get that first note started and you start that that that wheeze or that that throat clearing grawl at the beginning, once you get that established,
then we start climbing the octaves. So and it doesn't take much air pressure. Some people kind of overdo it and the being they like really do it super loud, like they do put lots of air across there, across the diaphragm. They put a lot of air through their throat. The problem is if you start out with lots and lots of air, as you climb the notes, it's harder, harder,
harder to control your diaphragm. It's almost like driving your car right whenever you pull out onto a street, if you have a car with a lot of horsepower, if you just mash on it from the from the red light and you take a left or you take it right, you can break traction. It's just kind of hard to control. Whereas if you just kind of put putt putt putt out into the intersection and once you get on a straight line, you gas it way easier to control. Right,
It's the same thing here. Start out with a modest amount of air and then as you climb the notes, put more air pressure behind it. So as you tighten your your tongue, then tighten your core and push more air pressure. So it's going to sound like this. This is without the without the tube. So just like our locator bugle, once you get up to that top note, you hold it for a little bit and then when you drop off the backside, we come down quick. Come
down quick, and add that punch of the gut. Now, to add some variance to your call, you can draw that out on the backside when you bring it down. But just for for beginner purposes, just to start off, start learning how to do this right off the bat. I would come off in the backside pretty quickly, because it seems like once if you start out the other way, draw it way out on the you know, draw it like a longer note coming off the backside it's hard to kind of break that habit and then to gain
more variants. So the important part about calling elk is like these, these first few calls I'm showing you, these are just the basic call. Once you get those mastered, then you're gonna want to practice adding some very to him. So you can shorten up. You can shorten up the first half. You can shorten up the back half of the call of the bugle. Same with the cow calls, same with the calf calls. You can change how hard you push your dut with the tongue on the diaphragm.
You can change how much air you're putting across. You could, like for cow callis and for instance, you can make you know, push a little more air pressure, a little more tongue pressure, makes some real loud calls, and then kind of back it off, make some quiet, quiet quiet ones, almost a whisper. This adds depth, It adds the illusion that there's more than one cow elk there. The bugles.
Not every bugle bowl bugles the same. Not every one of them sounds like a dinosaur, Not every one of them sounds like a kid just hitting puberty that has a little bit of a weird kind of voice. They all sound a little different and at different times. The same bowl may bugle differently. You know, if he's betted, he may just kind of groan it. If he's if he's chasing cows and getting feeling frustrated and trying to keep the East counts the line, he's gonna scream and
rip these huge bugles. So you just never know. That's why it's so important to learn that variance to these calls. So back back to making this bugle. So start out on that low end of your bugle, barely touching your diaphragm, getting that first note, add some add some throat clearing sounds, and then climb up the octave. Yeah, that's what the tube. See. Sounds so much better with the tube. So I encourage you if you can practice with the tube right off
the bat. Now, one huge important thing while using a tube is I see uh veteran callers do this. I see new callers do this, but they don't see all their lips around the tube. Right. We have to make an air tight seal on that tube with your lips. We don't want any of the air escaping out the side of your lips and the cracks, right, So we want to form our lips to the tube in its kind of a round fashion. That way we make a good air tight seal connection. That way, all the air's
going into the tube. It will help you articulate those notes. Now some advance calling. There are times I do break that seal, like on a like on a like a challenge bugle scream or something. I may hit that high note and have a little bit of air air seepage on the on the sides of my lips. Just a little little little bit air come out of there, just so I can scream a lot easier. And then and then I'll tighten up as I come down. It'll sound
something like this. But for most interstensive purposes, you're gonna want to seal your lips off on that tube. So back to gaining good control and smooth transitions. The best thing to do is spend that ten fifteen minutes a day practicing that. On your commute with your tube. People are gonna look at you like, what is that guy doing or gal doing? And some people might think you're drinking a bottle of wine. If you have at one of these tubes that looks like a baseball bat. I've
it almost looks like a bottle of wine. Some of them do, so you might get some funny looks from people. I know a guy that told me he got pulled over by a cop one time, and he said he was turned in by somebody said he was drinking a bottle of wine and the cop pulled over. He's like, I had a report you were drinking and driving. And he's like, no, I'm practicing my help. He looked over in the seat and showed him the tube and he's like, okay, I get it. Yep, all right, I have a good day.
So be careful on that. You know, people, especially if you live in the city, people kind of give you some funny looks. But maybe that's part of the fun anyway. Right. We want to practice that full bugle, so to get that control, we want to bugle over and over and over and over again, kind of like our siren routine. So we're gonna do this, yeah, yeah, just over and over and over again. That just that same routine over. You know, you go from the low to the high,
drop off, low to the high to drop off. Feel free to take a breath in between, especially if you're driving because you don't want to blackout, run out of air. But that that exercise, that right there, will create so much consistency on how good your bugles turn out. Because if you do an over and over again, Let's say you did a hundred of them, right, that built such great muscle memory to where there's no doubt you're doing
a hundred of them a day. There's no doubt every time you put your die from your mouth you're gonna be able to make the bugle that you want to hear. And then once you master that, play with it. You know you don't have to hit that highest note. Maybe you just want to do a lazy, lazy bugle to where you don't hardly climb off that very first note. You just and then you put a little bit more of that throat clearing noise or that voice into it. It's gonna sound something like this. You know, a lot
less air pressure you can do. You can do that kind of a variance. You could give it a little bit more on the back end instead of just dropping off the backside of bugle real abruptly. Then we can come off longer. You can play with it, you can add it, you can add whatever you want to it, but the most important thing is that it sounds like a real ELK. Now it's fun to watch your favorite YouTubers and trying to emulate and trying to reproduce the
same exact sounds they are. But honestly, the best course of action, the best practice you can get, is listening to real elk and outside of the rut, it's really hard to do that. So I recommend getting on YouTube. Send your significance other or your family to the water park, or send your significant other to the spa for the day, whatever that way you have some time alone in the house unless maybe they want to be part of it. You know, some families love to call together we see
you know, little kids, you know, they love it. They want to be like dad or mom calling ELK. So whatever the case is in your household, you know, make it, make it good and fun for everybody. But I would say turn on something on YouTube. There's a ton of videos. You can do some search like just elk bugling or
elk elk. You can just get creative with your searches and there's tons and tons of videos of rutting elk in like national parks and places like that, or people who just go out and record elk on the public land even. But what we're looking for is just hearing all those elk vocalizations, you know, all the cow calls, all those bugles, and what you'll find is like, as you're listening to all these different elk, man, that one sounds really good, like the typical elk call that we
all have grown to love. But man, that other one sounds sick, he doesn't even sound like an elk. Or that things sounds terrible. So the moral of the story is, you don't have to sound like that perfect cookie cutter three note bugle or some world champion ouk call. You don't have to You don't have to listen to that and be like, I have to really sound like that person.
What you have to sound like is a real elk. Now, I will say, whenever I say you have to sound good, that doesn't mean you don't have to like, sound like a real elk. I've I had an accounter here a couple of falls ago when I was calling a bowl and I called in another hunter. He come and tried to move in on me and the bowl. He thought we were real elk, and he was making these noises that sounded like a like a puz be that was
getting hurt or something. It was so odd and weird that I don't know why anyone would even try to attempt to make those kind of noises because it didn't sound anything like Elk. It didn't represent an elk whatsoever, and it kind of was like, it sounded so weird. I can't even reproduce the sound, but it was something
kind of like that. So you don't have to sound like a world championhip caller, absolutely not, but you do have to have Elk like sounds and that kind of a sound, that kind of a call is absolutely not an ELK sound, and that'll just scare them away. So if you can't make Elk sounds and you've practiced and practice, maybe you just have to put the calls away. But if you can, you know, maybe it's not that perfect
cookie cut or bugle. But man, you were watching some of these ELK videos and some of those sick sound and bowls, Yeah, I kind of sound like that. That'll work. That will call Elk in. It doesn't have to sound perfect, but it does have to sound like an elk. Now, another tip for practicing is video taping yourself. So videotape, man, I just dated myself. We don't have videotapes these days. That's all digital. So take your phone. We all have
a smartphone. Take your phone, put it somewhere pretty close to it to your face or didn't see yourself from your waist up or whatever, and then practice, hit your record button on the video and practice and go through your practice routine and stuff. And trust me, I think we're all guilty of being our own worst critic. So watch. When you watch it back, then you'll probably discover a lot of different things, like how you maybe thought or
perceived how it sounded versus what it sounds like. When you play it back, sometimes you'll spot that you're doing something odd or weird with your mouth or something that you're not intending to do. And if you can't see yourself do, it's kind of hard to spot. I don't know if you remember back in middle school in gym class and we're learning how to do cartwheels right, and I was I was not like the athletic kid in
when junior high school at all. So we did them and I'm like I did it, and they're like, you didn't do it like, yes I did, dude, your feet didn't come two feet off the ground, right, And until you see yourself do it, sometimes it's really hard to understand that feedback from someone else. So as you record yourself,
you will discover yourself. Maybe maybe you are letting some air escape around your lips when you're bugling, maybe you're doing something with your jaw, or maybe you're tightening up like maybe you're tucking your chin in, or maybe you're maybe you're doing weird body movements. Like people really get into this, Like I try to like not move my
body a lot. Now if you watch me chuckle and drunt, you'll see my belly kind of bounce of bit because I'm really working using that my core and my diaphragm to get those chuckles out. That's okay, But we don't we're not trying to like be too animated with their calls because of course in the elk woods, we don't want to move around that much. So by recording ourselves, we can kind of see some things that may be
hampering or hindering good elk quality sounds. If you're kind of hunched over and kind of tight in the in the chest, or whatever. You may not be able to hit all those high notes. Maybe you're not get enough air going through your calls. Maybe if you stand up straight and take deep breaths and really kind of open yourself up, that's that's a better way to get a little bit more air across the calls. But video yourself. It's surprising. I can video myself even right today, and
I'll be like, oh, I look funny. You're it's almost like you're in yourself talked right. You listen to yourself play back and anytime I've heard the podcast played back and like, man, my voice sounds weird. It sound like a nerd. So we don't always like the feedback we get from recording ourselves, but it's good if you're really trying to increase how realistic your alk calls sound. Well, that's going to be a wrap for today. Our next episode that I'm going to cover on calling ELK is
going to be chuckles, grunts, and barks. So that's going to take you to the next level. Those are harder, definitely harder, take a lot more effort. A lot of folks message me on Instagram, Facebook or talk to me in person, talk about man, I just really struggle with my grunts and my chuckles. How can what am I doing wrong? So I'll kind of go over those things on my next episode and see if we can get
you guys chuckle and grunting. And if you want to see this all, you know, if you want to see me making these calls, then I have an ELK calling series on my YouTube channel. My YouTube channel is called the Bugler. It's just spelled out one word, the Bugler. And if you go to my YouTube channel and select playlists, and you'll go down through the list and you'll see learn to call Out and it'll start from the basics of picking out a diaphragm all the way through the
most advanced calls. So if you need a little tune up, you want to see visual on how I'm doing it, which is really helpful sometimes to see somebody do something instead of just hear them tell you over a podcast, then you might give it, give it a look. See there's also some good el hunting videos on there in case you get bored and want to get amped up for ELK season. So anyway, thanks for following along today. Appreciate it man. Thirty one days thirty one days till September.
I can't wait, and I hope you guys and galas are making the right preparations to have successful successful hunts. So we'll see you next time.