Ep. 98: How to Call an Elk - Lip Bawls, Grunts, Chuckles, and Barks

You know, the short window of getting to the back country here in Idaho is it's tough because you know a lot of them places are just not accessible until after July first or so around fourth of July you can start hitting almost everywhere in the country just do to There's just so much snow. It just kind of lingers a little too long. But be that as it may. This episode, we're going to talk about lip balls, grunts, chuckles, and barks. Right, if you remember, back in episode number

eighty six, we covered calling fundamentals, cow calls, and basic bugles. Well, this is the next episode and final episode of this little calling series where we're going to kind of go over all the best practices to help you guys get a little better at Colin Elk and have a little more confidence as fall. But first, before we get too far to get too carried away, we have a question answer segment sponsored by Pendleton Whiskey Letter Buck. Now, this

question is not one in particular from one person. This question comes from direct messages, in person questions. People have called in and asked about this question. So I'm gonna do my best answer here. It is a very popular one and maybe some of you can relate. And the question is I can't chuckle very good and I'm worried about messing up my chances and calling in a bowl.

Can you help me with my chuckles? Well, first off, if you're struggling with chuckles and grunts and aren't confident with them, you can always just eliminate them from your calling routine. There's been several bowls over the years that I didn't chuckle or grunt at all when calling them in. And there's been a lot of bulls over the years who haven't chuckled or grunted. They just they did big bugles, they did big screams, things like that. So it's not

always one hundred percent necessary. Now, on the flip side, there are some bowls that that's all they do is chuckle and grunt, So you don't necessarily have to know how to chuckle and grunt to call in a bowl. Now, I will say, we'll definitely add to your confidence if you can get proficient at it. And I think where most people kind of struggle with chuckles and grunts are

the cadence rhythm tempo. And after doing lots of calling classes with a lot of folks, you know, trying to show them how I do it and kind of coach them to see if they can become better, I've noticed that a lot of people will take one deep breath and then try to do all their chuckles and grunts with that breath instead of breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. And when you just take one big breath to do your grunts and chuckles, then you kind of

ran out of gas halfway through. Right, Let's say you want to do seven chuckles or seven grunts, then about number five your start lives an arrow and then you're like, oh, I got to fit all these things in. So a lot of times people will kind of like change the pace, change the tempo and almost like hurriedly. But but also they get kind of weak towards the end because they're just they don't have enough air to make a good articulate chuckle or grunt. So I like to say, let's

let's slow this down. This is kind of back to basics. And it's almost like Mosquito, right, This is like like it's almost I feel like it's almost like dumbing it down too far. But I feel like if we can dumb it down so far to how I learned things, I need all the help I can get when I learn things. So I'm going to simplify this I'm gonna do. I always recommend making one chuckle or one grunt and

then taking a deep breath and making another one. And I'm focusing on making one perfect one before i start adding another one and another one. It's almost like reading a book too quick. It's like you start reading the book it is get interesting. You don't want to just flip through the pages and get to the back of the book and see how it ends, right, as tempting as it can be sometimes, so it's like we don't want to try to get to the end of our chunkles,

chuckles or grunts too quickly. We want to make sure we have plenty of time. We're in no hurry to get there, just we want to just make sure they sound good and sound articulate. Now, you might say, what is the difference between a chuckle and grunt? Okay, isn't that the same thing? Well, some people call it the same thing. Here's how I look at it. Chuckles to

me are a lot faster paced. They're a little shorter notes, more staccato, whereas grunts are gonna be more elongated, they're gonna have they're gonna have more time on the diaphragm, and then at a little bit slower tempo. So I'll give you a demonstration here. So here's chuckles, just fast past. I've even over the years, I've even had bulls that sound like almost like a monkey like. It's kind of a funny, funny little sound. Nay make that's like that's

a monkey bowl. But then here's grunts. You noticed are just longer, louder, Maybe not louder, but yeah, usually a little louder. But they're a longer, longer call it's a little slower pace. It's not so fast paced, And does it matter when calling bulls if you do chuckles or grunts, I usually like to match the bowl. If the bull's doing chuckles, I like to chuckle. The bull's doing these big, thunderous grunts, I like to do those too. And it might just be me, but I always feel like the

younger the bulls, the more chuckly they can be. Big bulls will chuckle, but they just they sound different. When you hear a four point bowl, like a two and a half year old bull chuckling, it's almost like he's just learning how to call that day. Sometimes they can be pretty terrible, but the pace, the tempo and such

will sound like a real elk. If you are a hunter and you're trying to do this with one breath, you're your your pace, the sound, everything is going to get kind of constricted and kind of weird, and it won't be won't be authentic. That's how I always tell if it's a hunter in the woods off Most times, if if the chuckles and grunts, if I hear a distant bugle, I'm like, oh, there's there's a bugle, And

then I'm listening, I'm like, oh, yeah, they're chuckling. Grunt, and then it seems like hunters kind of kind of messed that part up. It's like, oh, yeah, that's a dude. But I have been fooled a couple of times. I mean, no matter how much time you spend in the woods, it seems like you know it's in hearing elk. You can be fooled, especially elk or hunters. At a distance. You can't quite hear a good clip crystal clear, you can't hear them really well. Then I've been full before.

It's where I'm like, well, I got to go get a better I gotta hear this better. So I'll climb down or climb up. I'll climb over to where I can get a very good read on it. And a lot of times yet not a lot of times, but there's been a few times that it's been a hunter. I'm like, oh, shoot, dang it, now I have to climb six hundred feet back up to where I was at before. Uh So, but if you can identify those, it's it's pretty helpful keeps you from chasing chasing the

wrong thing in the woods. Right, So back to learning how to make the perfect one. So make a perfect one, and this is basically like an exaggerated col cal a grunt or a chuckle. The chuckle is just a shorter one. So we're just doing We're just doing a quick burst air across the diaphragm, and then we're adding our voice and then at the end that punch to the gut. If remember we did that punch to the gut on the bugles, We're going to do that again here, but

we're only hitting. We're only blasting that latex for just a moment. So without the tube, it's gonna sound like this. Oh, so just super short, super high pitched. Now to do the grunt, it's gonna be a little longer. Oh, it's just longer. So you're gonna have more of that, more of that almost cow sound. But we're not gonna let it slide off the back. We're not gonna slide off that back real nice and slow. We're just gonna keep

it up that high note. And whenever after you make that high note, then you're gonna completely drop your jaw and drop your tongue away, so the diaphragm quits making that that little noise, and then you're gonna throw in the punch of the gut almost like your beat boxing. And sometimes we're with folks coaching them, they kind of struggle with that whole making the making the punch to the gut at the right right time. So there's definitely

a line in the sand. Once you make that noise, once you make that chuckle or grunt with your diaphragm and you and you drop your jaw, that's when you're you're you're punched to the gut comes in. You're reflecting your voice. And sometimes folks will blend that that voice in to the diaphragm sound and it'll sound something like this, which you just it don't sound quite right, especially you know you even in the tube, it doesn't sound right. It's not horrible, it's not a it's not a game

changer or a deal breaker. You can still call out like that. But if you want to try to sound as authentic as you can, you want to kind of break that down. So if if you're struggling with that part, try to make the diaphragm sound first, and just as soon as you do that, make put the voice inflection in kind of like this, So slow it way down. If you're struggling, just slow everything down, right, We don't

have to do it fast. Slow it way down until we train our brain and our tongue, our internal core, diaphragm, all that to work together, so it'll sound something like this. Come just slowly, work at it, work at it until you break it down. You just first make that sound, and then once you kind of get that figured out, speed it up a little bit, put them together a

little quicker until you can do it like this. Now, once you've learned how to make the perfect one, right, so we can make every time you put the diaphragm in your mouth, you can make that you know what's gonna come out. You can make that perfect grunt or chuckle. Oh great, we can make one perfect one. So make a perfect one inhale. Get a big bunch of air in your lungs. Be careful, don't don't suck the diaphragm

down your throat. A good buddy of mine, Jermaine Hodge, world champion collar he was showing his wife and kids, is like, all right, here's how you gotta do it. You gotta you gotta in between each chuckle or grunt, you have to. You have to inhale real big, and he kind of over exaggerated as inhale, and he sucked that diaphragm down his throat literally and uh, it took a while for it to come out, but did it did everything. He didn't have to have surgery anything and everything.

Nature took its course. But you know that can be scary. You know, it could have blocked his throat and he might have had to go to the emergency room. So just it's you got have to be careful when you're when you're doing this, either working with yourself, working with kids, or working with others. You never know. You could suck one of these diaphragms down your throat and that would be that'd be a bad day. So anyhow, build make that perfect one, take a deep breath, make another perfect one.

We're not in a rush. We're not in a rush to make seven. Our goal here is to make one perfect one. Take a deep breath, make another perfect one. Take a deep breath, make another perfect one. Something kind of like this.

I'll let you decide. And it's just going to take practice to do this. So make a perfect one, deep breath, Make another perfect one, deep breath, make another perfect one. Then slowly build that tempo, and I will say, practice this with your tube. I've been doing a lot of these demonstrations with without my tube, just to kind of give you the sound profile, but definitely practice with your tube. It seems like the more we practice whether tube, the

more comfortable we are with the tube. I've during these coaching opportunities I've had over the years and working with folks. If we if we spend too much time practicing without a tube, then when we pick the tube up and put it to our lips, that just adds a whole new layer of different Right. Okay, you've trained your brain, your your tongue, your diaphragm, you your core all of that, you've trained that, and then you put a tube to your lips, and now your lips are like what do

I do with my lips? So you have to, like I would, I would say practice if you can't practice this with a tube as much as possible, maybe to get the very fundamentals down. You know, if you're having trouble hitting that, you know, breaking apart the diaphragm and the punch to the gut, you do that without a tube. But just as soon as you can start figuring that out, put your tube up there, seal off all the air, don't let it come around the edges. Don't have any

cracks or gaps on your lips. We want all this sound to go inside the tube. We want that good hollow thump sound from your punch to the gut. Right. And some some ladies, you know, have a hard time with this part coaching. Some of the ladies they just they're not they don't have a naturally deep voice, or they're not they don't naturally go around making beat box sounds like a lot of the guys do. For for

whatever reason. So one gal, I'm like, oh, you gotta get like you gotta you gotta dig in deep, like what makes your husband? What does your husband do to make you mad? You know where you're like, oh, you know, you're just you're really getting frustrated. Maybe you may have to tap into that inner inner beast a little bit that you maybe you have never set free or maybe you don't set free very often, but you have to. You have to experiment with that, and I know you

can do it. You know, ladies or even guys sometimes because there's a there's a young lady. She's a teenage girl from from eastern Oregon. She came to one of my seminars one time and the and she was probably thirteen the first time I ever heard her call and she said hey, after the seminar was over, she's like, hey, can I can I do some calling for you? And I'd love to hear your calling. And I was blown away. She had mastered those deep guttural thumps for her chuckles

and grunts. She could inflect her voice like we did on the on the on the bugles where we kind of cleared our throat like it was amazing. She can bugle at thirteen better than ninety percent of men that I've heard out there so very very cool. So I feel like if that thirteen year old young lady could could do that, you know, any any ladies can do it. Any guys can do it, even kids. It's just finding

that spot. And I feel like maybe guys have a little easier time with it because we're always trying to flex our bravado with our deep voice. Or maybe we like listening to rap music and we kind of like to do the puck stuff. I don't know. So some of us come at it real naturally and others have to work at it more. And that's okay, just work at it. It's because like any anything, like some people tape can can can pick up an instrument or some kind of sport or or anything and just pick it

right up there and natural at it. Well, some elk calling is no different. Some people pick right up to elk calling right away. Others of us we have to. We have to practice a lot, so don't get gets discouraged. I've some of the folks have coached over the years have messaged me a couple of years later and sent me a bugle and chuckles and all the calls, and they're like, man, I finally figured this out. It just took me a while. And now you know the great caller is going to be able to call in elk,

so so don't don't give up. So anyway, back to the back of the chuckles and grunts to practice those with the tube. And once you you kind of start making the chuckles and grunts and you're like, oh, it's working, it's working, then you can push to get a little bit different notes. You notice I can get some little higher notes, a little lower notes with the with the

diaphragm portion of my of my chuckle or grunt. That's just experimenting pushing a little harder with my tongue, you know, to hit that higher note, or or not pushing quite as quite as hard with my tongue to hit those lower notes. All right, So since we've been talking about chuckles and grunts, it seems like we should be talking about barks barking, right, And basically a bark is an exaggerated grunt, and you might you might say, what, what the heck, why would you want to bark at an elk.

We talked about this in episode ninety four in Non Typical Elk Calling, we covered barks and other elk vocalizations, and the bark is not always an alarm. A lot of times when bulls are hung up, they will bark at us, will come in, they'll rake the horns, and if that other bull at I e. The hunter, doesn't show themselves, that bull will kind of get nervous and be like, hey, I came all the way over here. You know, we were having an an argument and I've

challenged you and you have not shown yourself. A lot of times they will bark and kind of say, they will kind of say, you know, show yourself. In my mind, that's what they're saying. Now, who knows in in an elk's mind, But to me, that's what they're saying. And just from my anecdotal experience is that that kind of makes sense. Just because they'll come in, they'll hang up, they'll rub for a while, and if they don't, if they don't just come in after that, they kind of

get nervous. They'll bark a couple times, and that's when I bark back at them. And a lot of times after I bark, I'll bark and chuckle. I'll bark and scream, and I'll do what I call the old we iype wisbang we Ipe is the small North Idaho town I grew up in as a kid. I don't know I call it that. It just came out. I blurted it

out one day. Kind of a stupid name. But anyway, what the Wei wiz Bang is is I bark, scream or bark and chuckle whatever seems appropriate at the time, and then I'll charge up like I'm a pissed off bull. I'll call charge up. If the bull's fifty yards, maybe

I'll charge up twenty twenty five yards. If they're sixty yards thirty yards right, I want to try to cover half the distance to where once that bull unlocks and says, oh, I got to see this other bull and they step out from behind the tree they've been hiding behind, I'll be within shooting distance. Now sixty percent of the time. It works every time. I don't even know what works that much, but it is a very effective tool. And I've killed a lot of bulls that way. I've called

in a lot of bulls that way. Sometimes they didn't just didn't get to get the shot because there's too much brush, good old, good old Idaho brush in the way. But I kept him from leaving because a lot of times they'll come in and they'll bark, and if you feel like, oh man, man bark, Now you're pinned down right, I can't do anything. And that's a I remember having that feeling as a younger caller, a less experienced collar, and I would kind of go quiet, like, oh man,

he saw me, he heard meath something's not right. And if they bark and they don't get the right reaction, a lot of times they just walk away. And once that bull walks away and he gets eighty yards to one hundred yards away and walks away that far. At that point, he's kind of deemed you as a chicken. He's like, man, this guy, he's a chump. Heete. He talked a lot of game, but I shut him right up. And a lot of times you you can try pretty

hard and you can't get that interaction going again. It's like once they kind of write you off, then you're done for the day with that bull. So that's kind of why I like to escalate a little bit at that last time. Whenever they bark, then I will I'll bark back, and I'll move up and just walk. Sometimes it like I take five steps just enough to where I'm popping some brush and breaking some sticks and that

right there is enough. They're like, oh, here it comes, and they'll pop out and they'll want to they want to see that bull that's approaching, and a lot of times it's broadside, which is kind of counterintuitive. This is like a great solo tactic because a lot of folks, oh, you know, as a solo hunter, you know a lot of times you'll get them coming in front on you know, a frontal shot, but a lot of times they'll come out kind of broadside because they want to make theirselves

look big. At this point, they hear that bull coming, It's time to show off, right, I want to show this other bowl how big I am. I'm gonna stand here broadside, puff up, I'm gonna display my antlers. I'm gonna put my antlers back and kind of move my head around, or I may just stand there facing my head turned towards him. You know, just just wanting to make myself look big. And if you can get move up a little bit, stop knock your arrow and be ready for that interaction to happen. A lot of times

you can get a shot. So back to how to make a bark. So, like I said, it's an exaggerated an exaggerated chuckle or a grunt. More of a exaggerated grunt. I think it's a little longer than a chuckle, which is an exaggerated cow call. So remember back in this previous episode we talked about how to you know, do fundamentals, cow calls, bugles, all that, all those little things. Learning learning all those basic sounds from the beginning will help

you all along this journey. So the biggest difference between a bark and a chuckle or a grunt is the intensity. So let's say a chuckle or a grunt that's level six, level level five. As far as intensity and volume, you don't have to be super loud, just has to be well articulated. But a bark, we're turning the knob up to ten, maybe even eleven. Right, this is going to be loud. If you ever hear an elk bark, it's loud. So I'll demonstrate my version of one wow. A lot

of times they'll make one big high one big bark. One. Sometimes they'll even make a bark and then a second one. Maybe that's not quite as high pitched, but I'm trying to make that thing as high pitch as I can and inflect as much voice as I can. And there again, if you're struggling separate in your voice and the diaphragm sound, you just have to practice that. You know, slow it way down until you can do it slowly and execute it perfectly, and then pick it up make it go faster.

And then after you do that, you could even add some chuckles. Sometimes I'll just bark and scream and they'll charge forward, doing the old weipe whizbang all right. Last, but not least in these advanced calls, is the lip ball. Now, I'd say, what the heck's a lipball? Some people call it all sorts of things, but basically, you're buzzing your lips to make a balling sound, kind of a gut ural, wheezy sound. You're adding that kind of sound to your bugle.

It's real nasty. You've you've probably heard it, you've probably maybe you've heard other hunters do it, but maybe you haven't heard a bull do it. But essentially, you're making a bawling sound by buzzing your lips. And this is probably the hardest call for most folks. Right after chuckles and grunt. Some people even get pretty good at this but still struggle with the chuckles and grunt. So pick your poison, right. Everybody has their own weaknesses and their

own you know what things they excel at. But I do know when I first started trying to make this lip ball, I sucked. I couldn't do it. It's it was like, man, because I was thinking so much about all right, make the lip buzz thing and then trying to get the bugle to come along with it and have a good smooth transition. It would just it just never sounded right.

So at that time, I was working hard at trying to be a competition ELK caller, you know, for the World Championships that the Rocky Mountain ELK Foundation puts on every year. And I'm like, well, I can't compete with all these other hunters or callers if they can do that well and I can't. So I began practicing, and I felt like, okay, as with anything calling, don't practice what you're good at, practice what you suck at, which

happened to be the lip ball. So what I would do, and it was the whole buzzing of the lips right, and I'd watched lots of people do it, and most of them put their tube on the front of their lips, right below their nose, you know, that little dip under your nose. It looks like somebody pressed their finger right under your nose and left a mark, you know. They centered centered their tube up with that mark, you know, right in the front of their lips. And I really

struggled with that. But then after I messed around and played with buzzing my lips on my tube, I found that putting the tube on the right side of my lips, almost in the corner of my lips, my lips buzzed better. They buzzed really well there. So some people they they're a left side buzzer, sometimes they're a center buzzer. Sometimes they're a right side buzzer. Like me, you just have to explore, you have to you have to experiment with buzzing your lips. And it's not a natural It's not

a natural thing to do. As kids, you know, we walked around being especially boys, you walk around being annoying to everybody, buzzing your lips, making weird and goofy noises and stuff. Girls not so much. Seems like just us boys are just so annoying. But by practicing spearmenting and like trying to figure out how do you buzz your

lips the best. And if you buzz your lips too tight, if you if you flex your lips too tight, they don't get a good buzz if you if you don't do them tight enough, they won't hardly buzz at all. You have to find that that perfect, perfect tension on your lips. And it's a lot easier to practice this on your tube than it is without a tube. I found I kind of struggled to do it without a tube. So you could make like the okay sign with your

thumb and your and your first finger. You can make a little circle there if you didn't have a tube, and you could put your lips on it. It's just it just nice to have something to place your lips on it. They seem to perform a little better. It's so silly. You can buzz your lips doing that. Now. I sat down and I watched I'm like, all right, I'm going to practice this every night. I practiced every

night for a month. They get off work, be watching TV with the wife and kids, and I would cover the end of my tube, so it wasn't loud, and I'd sit there buzzing my lips watching TV. Of course, you can imagine the eye rolls I got from my wife. She's just like, you're a weirdo, what do you do with this? But she kind of kind of expect it, you know, she knew I'm kind of weird anyway, making all these animal noises in the house. Some of us don't have that luxury. Some might just get kicked out

of the house. Right, So if you if you have to, you know, this is something you can do on your on your drive to work, on your commute. You can do it out in the garage, maybe a little bit of man time out in the shop. You know, you don't have to do it for hours. But if you were sitting there for you know, ten minutes a day buzzing your lips on your tube, you'll figure this out.

You First off, you have to become very proficient at buzzing your lips, so every single time that you put that tube to your lips, it's going to make that right buzz. Now, if I found like there's there's a lot of technique like which is kind of hard to explain without showing you in person, right, But there's some lipballing that you do with more the out outer part of your lips, the part that's gonna buzz closest to

the tube. Then if you really, if you almost like do duck lips like the girls used to do on social media right back in two thousand and nine, If you do duck lips and the more inner part of your of your lip, the fleshy inner part closer to your teeth, if you can learn to make that buzz, it'll make a nastier, dirtier buzz and a dirtier lip ball,

which is super desirable. Like people people love that ELK love that it's going to sound a lot more realistic because no matter how hard and how good we practice and how good we sound and how big and badass we see when it comes right down to like going bugle for bugle for an elk and you're standing there listening,

it's like, yeah, that's like fifty percent. Like even like a five point, like a two and a half year old five point can sound pretty wicked compared to a caller, especially if you step back, like let's say the caller is, you know, fifty sixty eighty yards away and the bowl is the same. It's just like there's no comparison, and a real elk is is really hard to compete with. So a lot of people will say, you know, never never overdo it. You want to call as whimpy as

you can. Well, if I call wimpy as I can, I'm not even I'm not even the same world as a real elk. Right, even a wimpy elk. There's a lot of wimpy elk out there, but there's sure volume there. Volume that comes out of their lungs across their vocal cords is amazing, right, So I feel like when a bowl is bugling aggressively making those big nasty lip ball type sounds, now he's not doing that he with these lips.

He's he's doing that with his his vocal cords. And over the years, like there's been some bulls, like old, old mature bulls, I don't know how old they were. They had big orange handlers as some people call them, and giant body looked like a school bus pushing through the brush, right, And some of these bulls would have

no high pitch at all to their bugle. It would just a just kind of a groany, wheezy sound that's from for the last ten years or twelve years, however old this bull was from just destroying his focal cords from bugling. Now, I will say a two and a half, three and a half year old five point that thinks

he's tougher than John Wayne's kid, Well that bowl. Those bulls can can be pretty deceiving too, Like they can they can really get grolly and get that gravelly voice and almost lose their the high pitch to their voice. I've heard, I've seen it. So like they say, you can't you can't judge a bull by by his bugle,

but a lot of times you can. But it's not a it's not a perfect science by no means for anyone, for for anybody that I know this haves have spent a lot of time, you know, in the woods listening to bulls. But back back to I kind of got side railed there, back to how to make this call. So we're buzzing our lips. You buzz, buzz, buzz, put

your lips on the tube. You don't want to, you don't wanna, you don't want to purse your lips and make them tight like you're trying to operate a blowgun, right, or maybe maybe the blowgun people are bringing to comment and say, well that's not how you run a blowgun either. But but put your butt your lips up there and just make you know, tighten them up just enough tension to where you can can make a buzz. Now you just have to experiment, uh uh uh ah, and you

sit there and buzz. Now. Be in a band a geek, right. I played band in high school as a saxophone player, if you will, a real kinney g except I was not that good. But I remember the trumpet people, you know, the brass folks that had the little mouthpiece that where they buzz their lips, you know before the big concert

and stuff. You know that our band instructor would say, hey, everybody, you know all the brass people, pull your mouthpiece off of your instrument and buzz your lips into the mouthpiece because that warms up your lips, It gets the blood flowing in there, It desensitizes them and makes more pliable. And this is this holds true for buzzing for your lip balls too, for elk. So that first, what you're gonna find it's gonna be unnatural. Your lips are gonna

feel kind of tight. But as you do this, like within thirty second, if you just start doing every breath for like thirty seconds to a minute, you're gonna start noticing your your your lips are gonna fill a lot more pliable, a lot more soft, little bit more a

little almost almost numb actually. So warm up your lips and then just practice and practice and practice, and once you can get to the point where every time you put your lips on that tube and you can buzz them, that's when we put our diaphragm in our mouth and start practicing that. So remember our good old friend Mosquito. Well, Mosquito is gonna help us out here again. Remember that high note a lot of folks struggle with. If you can master that from the beginning, Okay, we're gonna use

it for our lip ball here. So we're gonna hit that high mosquito, noight, high mosquito note and buzz our lips and hold it. And then right at the end we're gonna quit buzzing. We're gonna drop off the back side and we're gonna do that punch to the gut right. It's kind of like the combination of a few different things. Mosquito normal bugle, like locater bugle, buzze your lips and then drop off the back punch to the gup. Sounds

like this. Now, if that's the only one you can do it, you can't do like a full bugle and then put a lip buzz and a lip ball into your full bugle and drop it off the back. That's okay, this works too, But if you want to, if you want to get good at that, just practice that over and over and over and over again, just one lip ball bugle after another, over and over again, and then you'll be like, oh I got this. So come September, you start hearing a big bull doing that, you want

to do the same thing. You can do it now for the full bugle, where it's no different than a normal full bugle. We're gonna inflect our voice in the beginning like we're trying to clear our throat. Then we're gonna hit our diaphragm. We're gonna barely touch our diaphragm, make a little bit of a noise as soon as we get that. As soon as that diaphragm joins our voice inflection. We're gonna tighten up and climb the stair case of notes. Of course, as you climb the staircase notes,

you remove your voice inflection. Get to that top high note. Soon as you hit the top of that top of the ladder with your notes, that's when you buzz your lips. Buzz it, hold it, and then drop off the bat And at the end that note, that inning note. Right before you drop it off, you might even you might even throw a little bit of extra air volume at that high pitched note and then drop it off to that punch of the gut. I'd like to say it's simple for me. It is, but I've practiced this this

like in nineteen ninety seven. I figured this out right. So since ninety seven until twenty twenty four, I've been proficient at it. So it's second nature to me. So if you suck right from the beginning, I did too. It just takes some time. Invest that time. We have sixteen days till September. You could figure this out in the next sixteen days, I promise you. And when you're practicing.

We talked about this in that previous episode. When you're practicing, get on the YouTube you know, watch real elk rut and vocalize with each other. There's a lot of channels out there who record elk vocalizations in national parks and places, and you just get to hear. You get to hear the full gamut, and what you'll soon figure out is like, Wow, these elk don't really sound like those world champion collers I see on YouTube. They sound kind of the same,

but really there's a big difference. And one of the cool differences you're gonna see is there's a lot of balls that just don't bugle perfect. They got a weird off sound and bugle it's just like wow, that sounded terrible, But it doesn't sound like an inexperienced caller who just cracked open his his his calls from the walmart on the way to hunting camp. Right, He's not making weird

puppy noises or something. You know it. You know, even if you can't master a perfect, quintessential bugle like all your favorite YouTube callers, but you sound like a mad elk. You know, you sound like an elk that's kind of ticked off and it ain't perfect. That's what calls real elk in So practice to the sounds of real elk and you'll be able to call him in. Well, that's

it for this episode. One thing I would definitely recommend downloading this episode and episode ninety six just in case this all you're in the back country and you're like, you know, dang it, you get stuck and you're like, how did I mean I need to remember how to make that one call. If you don't have service, you'll be able to listen to it and be like, oh, yeah, I remember that's what he said. You can download that and get a little refresher during mid season or whatever

along the hunt. If even if you're backpacked in you'll be able to listen to it up close to your at night or something, just to make sure that you're getting it figured out. And like I mentioned mentioned last time, if you'd like to watch me make these calls, you can check out my personal YouTube channel. It's one word, the bugler, right, the bugler, and sometimes it'll it'll really move the needle to watch somebody making the rather than just hear it. You can watch watch me make it.

You can watch what I'm doing with my jaw, my lips, et cetera. It seems like I'm more of a visual learner, so I can only think there's probably a lot of other people out there too that like to see visuals. So I'll put a link in the show notes below how you're on this episode. So anyhow, well, thanks for listening. Guys and gals. We'll catch up with you. We'll catch up with you on the next episode.