Ep. 98: How to Call an Elk - Lip Bawls, Grunts, Chuckles, and Barks
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So come hang with me, Steve, Yanni, Cal, and the rest of the Medeater crew every Thursday at 11 a.m. Mountain Time on the Medeater Podcast Network YouTube channel. And remember, it's live, so anything can happen. Does that mean I can finally do my segment about animal sex? Well, almost anything. I have one question, and that question is, is it September yet?

Welcome back to another episode of Cutting the Distance Podcast. I'm Dirk Durham, and there are 16 days left until September. I can't even believe it. Seems like this summer is just kind of blown by. It's been super busy for me. We've had lots of camping trips, done a lot of family stuff, and a lot of scouting, and it seems like there's never enough days in summer.

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 1st or so around 4th of July, you can start hitting almost everywhere in the back country just due 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 86, 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 calling elk and have a little more confidence this fall.

But first, before we get too far, get too carried away, we have a question and 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, yeah.

I'm going to do my best to answer it here. It's 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 in calling in a bull. 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 bulls 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 100% necessary. Now, on the flip side, there are some bulls 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 bull. Now, I will say it will 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 rhythm.

After doing lots of elk 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, you start losing air. 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 slow this down. This is kind of back to basics. And it's almost like mosquito, right? This is 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 going to do, I always recommend making one chuckle or one grunt and then taking a deep breath and make 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, this is getting 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 chuckles or grunts too quickly. We want to make sure we have plenty of time. We're in no hurry to get there. 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 going to be more elongated. They're going to 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 paced. I've even, over the years, I've even had bowls that sound like almost like a monkey. Like, it's kind of a funny, funny little sound they make. It's like, oh, that's a monkey bowl. But then here's Grunts.

You notice they're 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, so fast pace. And yeah,

Does it matter when calling bulls if you do chuckles or grunts? I usually like to match the bull. If the bull is doing chuckles, I like to chuckle. If the bull is 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 bull, 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...

or a hunter, and you're trying to do this with one breath, your, 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, uh, in the woods off most times, if, if the, 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 mess 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 crystal clear voice.

you can't hear them really well, then I've been fooled before. It's where I'm like, well, I got to go get a better, I got to 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, um, you know, not a lot of times, but there's been a few times, um, that it's been a hundred. I'm like, Oh shoot, dang it. Now I have to climb 600 feet back up to where I was at before. Uh, so, um,

But if you can identify those, it's pretty helpful. It keeps you from 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 cow call.

a grunt or a chuckle. The chuckle is just a shorter one. So we're just doing, we're just doing a quick burst of air across the diaphragm. And then we're adding our voice. And then at the end, that punch to the gut, if you remember, we did that punch to the gut on the bugles. We're going to do that again here. We're only hitting, we're only blasting that latex for just a moment. So without the tube, it's going to sound like this. Okay.

So just super short, super high pitched. Now to do the grunt, it's going to be a little longer. It's just longer. So you're going to have more of that, more of that almost cow sound, but we're not going to let it slide off the back. We're not going to slide off that back real nice and slow. We're just going to keep it at that high note. And whenever we're going to do the grunt,

After you make that high note, then you're going to completely drop your jaw and drop your tongue away. So the diaphragm quits making that, that little noise. And then you're going to throw in the punch to the gut. Almost like you're beatboxing. And sometimes working with folks, coaching them, they kind of struggle with that whole making the punch.

making the punch to the gut at the 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 drop your jaw, that's when your punch to the gut comes in. You're reflecting your voice. And sometimes folks will blend that voice in to...

the diaphragm sound and it'll sound something like this, which you just, you 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 elk 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, 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. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Just slowly work at it. Work at it till 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 going to 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 caller. He was showing his wife and kids is like, all right, here's how you got to do it. You got to, you got to in between each chuckle or grunt, you have to, you have to inhale real big. And he kind of over exaggerated his inhale and he sucked that diaphragm down his throat.

literally. And, uh, it took a while for it to come out, but it did, it, everything, he didn't have to have surgery or anything, everything nature took its course. But, um, you know, that can be scary. You know, it, it could have blocked his throat and he might've had to go to the emergency room. So just, it's, you have to be careful when you're, when you're doing this, either working with yourself, working with kids or working with others. Um,

You never know. You could suck one of these diaphragms down your throat and that would be a bad day. So anyhow, Bill, 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. Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Just slowly work through this. This is how we're practicing over and over and over again to where it just becomes natural. And then once you can do that, then we want to quicken the pace a little bit. Almost like...

Almost like a choo-choo train. Take enough. Choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo. You know, you're building tempo. You're building pace. You know, it gets a little quicker until we get the one that we want to go with. Now, if it's a really fast one for chuckles, if it's a lot slower one for grunts, 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 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 with our 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. OK, you've trained your brain, your your tongue, your diaphragm, your 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 say practice if you can 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 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, um, coaching some of the ladies. Um, 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, yeah.

one gal, I'm like, Oh, you gotta get like, you gotta, you gotta dig in deep. Like what makes your husband, what, 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've 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, um, because there's a, there's a,

young lady, she's a teenage girl from Eastern Oregon. She came to one of my seminars one time and she was probably 13 the first time I ever heard her call. She said, hey, after the seminar was over, she's like, hey, can I do some calling for you? I said, I'd love to hear your calling. And I was blown away.

she had mastered those deep guttural, um, thumps from, for her chuckles and grunts. Um, she could, 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 13 better than 90% of men, um, that I've heard out there. So, uh, very, very cool. So I feel like if that 13 year old young lady could, could do that, um,

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 listen to rap music and we kind of like to do the beatbox 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.

like anything, like some people take can pick up an instrument or some kind of a sport 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 discouraged. I've some of the folks I've coached over the years

have messaged me a couple 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 don't give up so anyway back to the back to the chuckles and grunts practice those with the tube

And once 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 diaphragm portion of my chuckle or grunt. That's just experimenting, pushing a little harder with my tongue, you know, to hit that higher note or not pushing quite as hard with my tongue to hit those lower notes.

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It seems like we should be talking about barks, barking, right? And basically a bark is an exaggerated grunt. And you might say, what the heck? Why would you want to bark at an elk? We talked about this in episode 94 in non-typical elk calling. We covered barks and other elk vocalizations. And the bark is not always an alarm, right?

A lot of times when bulls are hung up, they will bark at us. We'll come in, they'll rake the horns. And if that other bull, 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 argument and I've challenged you and you have not shown yourself. A lot of times they will bark and kind of say, okay.

They will kind of say, you know, show yourself. In my mind, that's what they're saying. Now, who knows in an elk's mind, but to me, that's what they're saying. And just for my anecdotal experiences, 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 wee-ipe whiz-bang. Wee-ipe is the small North Idaho town I grew up in as a kid. I don't know why I call it that. It just came out. I blurted it out one day. It's kind of a stupid name. But anyway, what the wee-ipe whiz-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 elk. I'll charge up.

If the bull's 50 yards, maybe I'll charge up 20, 25 yards. If they're 60 yards, 30 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, 60% of the time it works every time. I don't even know if it 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 a, get the shot because there was 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

And if you feel like, oh man, yeah, bark, now you're pinned down, right? I can't do anything. And that's, I remember having that feeling as a younger caller, a less experienced caller, and I would kind of go quiet like, oh man, he, he saw me. He heard me. Something's, 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 80 yards to 100 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. 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

And that right there is enough. They're like, oh, here he comes. And they'll pop out and they'll want to, they'll 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 their selves look big. At this point, they hear that bull coming and it's time to show off, right? I want to show this other bull how big I am. I'm going to stand here broadside, puff up. I'm going to display my antlers. I'm going to put my antlers back and kind of move my head around. Or I may just stand there facing my head turned.

uh, towards him, you know, just, just wanting to make myself look big. And if, if you can get, move up a little bit, stop, knock your arrow and be ready for that, 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, um, chuckle or a grunt, more of an 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 do fundamentals, cow calls, bugles, all that. All those little things, 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 five, as far as intensity and volume. You don't have to be super loud. It just has to be well articulated. But a bark, we're turning the knob up to 10, maybe even 11, 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.

A lot of times they'll make one big high, one big bark. 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 separating 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 can even add some chuckles. Sometimes I'll just bark and scream. And I'll charge forward doing the old wee-hype whiz-bang. All right, last but not least in these advanced calls is...

The lip ball. Now, you might say, what the heck's a lip ball? Some people call it all sorts of things. But basically, you're buzzing your lips to make a bawling sound, kind of a guttural, wheezy sound. You're adding that kind of sound to your bugle.

It's real nasty. 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 grunts. Some people even get pretty good at this, but still struggle with the chuckles and grunts. 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, um,

I sucked. I couldn't do it. 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

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 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'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 experiment with buzzing your lips. And it's not a natural thing to do. As kids, you know, we walk 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.

By practicing, experimenting, and trying to figure out how do you buzz your lips the best. And if you buzz your lips too tight, if you flex your lips too tight, they don't get a good buzz. If you don't do them tight enough, they won't hardly buzz at all. You have to find that perfect tension on your lips. And it's a lot easier to practice this technique.

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, in 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 just, it just had, it's nice to have some, something to place your lips on it. They seem to perform a little better. 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. I 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 in my lips, watching TV. Of course you can imagine the eye rolls I got from my wife. She's just like, why don't you're a weirdo? What do you do with this? But she kind of come to expect it. You know, she, she knew I'm kind of weird anyway, making all these animal noises in the house. Um,

Some of us don't have that luxury. Some might just get kicked out of the house, right? So if you have to, you know, this is something you can do 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, 10 minutes a day buzzing your lips on your tube, you'll figure this out. First off, you have to become very proficient at buzzing your lips. So every single time that you put that tube to your lips, you're

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, um, without showing you in person. Right. But there's some lip balling that you do with more of the outer part of your lips, the part that's going to 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 2009, you do duck lips and, and,

The more inner part 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 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 sound 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 50%. Like even like a five point, like a two and a half year old five point can sound pretty wicked compared to a collar. Especially if you step back, like let's say the collar is, you know, 50, 60, 80 yards away and the bowl is the same. It's just like, there's no comparison and a real elk is,

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 wimpy as you can. Well, if I call wimpy as I can, I'm not even close. 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 the sheer volume, the air volume that comes out of their lungs and across their vocal cords is is amazing, right? So

I feel like when a bull is bugling aggressively, making those big nasty lip ball type sounds. Now he's not doing that with his lips. He's, he's doing that with his, his vocal cords. And, 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 horns, antlers as some people call them. And, 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 was just a, just kind of a groany, wheezy sound. That's from, for the last 10 years or 12 years, however old this bull was, from just destroying his vocal 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 bull, those bulls can be pretty deceiving too. Like they can really get growly and get that gravelly voice and almost lose the high pitch of their voice. I've heard, I've seen it. So like they say, you can't judge a bull by his bugle, but a lot of times you can.

But it's not a perfect science by no means for anyone, for anybody that I know that have spent a lot of time in the woods listening to bulls. 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 want to purse your lips and make them tight like you're trying to operate a blowgun, right? Or maybe the blowgun people are probably going to comment and say, well, that's not how you run a blowgun either. But put your lips up there and just make – tighten them up just enough tension to where you can make a buzz. Now, you just have to experiment. And you sit there and buzz. Now –

being a band geek, right? I played band in high school. I was a saxophone player, if you will, a real Kenny G, except I was not that good. But I remember the trumpet people, the brass folks that had the little mouthpiece where they buzzed their lips. Before the big concert and stuff, our band instructor would say, hey, everybody, all the brass people pull

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 them more pliable. And this holds true for buzzing for your lip balls too, for elk. So at first, what you're going to find, it's going to be unnatural. Your lips are going to feel kind of tight. But as you do this, like within 30 seconds, if you just start doing every breath for like 30 seconds to a minute, you're going to start noticing your lips are going to feel tight.

a lot more pliable, a lot more soft, a little bit more, a little almost, almost numb. Um, actually, so warm up your lips and then just practice and practice and practice. And once you, 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, we put our diaphragm in our mouth and start practicing that. So,

Remember our good old friend mosquito? Well, mosquito is going to 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 going to use it for our lip ball here. So we're going to hit that high mosquito note and buzz our lips.

and hold it. And then right at the end, we're going to quit buzzing. We're going to drop off the backside and we're going to do that punch to the gut, right? It's kind of like a combination of a few different things. Mosquito, normal bugle, like locator bugle, buzz your lips, and then drop off the back, punch to the gut. Sounds like this.

Now, if that's the only one you can do, you can't do like a full bugle and then put a lip buzz, a lip ball into your full bugle and drop it off the back. That's OK. 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're

You start hearing a big bull doing that. You want to do the same thing. You can do it. Now for the full bugle, it's no different than a normal full bugle. We're going to inflect our voice in the beginning. Like we're trying to clear our throat. Then we're going to hit our diaphragm. We're going to 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 going to tighten up and climb the staircase of notes. Of course, as you climb the staircase notes, you remove your voice inflection, get to that top high note. As 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 back.

And at the end, that in note, that ending note, right before you drop it off, you might even throw a little bit of extra air volume at that high pitch note and then drop it off to that punch to the gut. I'd like to say it's simple. For me, it is, but I've practiced this before.

Like in 1997, I figured this out, right? So since 97 till 2024, 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 16 days till September. You can figure this out in the next 16 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, watch real elk.

rut and vocalize with each other. There's a lot of, 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 callers 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 going to see is

There's a lot of bowls that just don't bugle perfect. They got a weird off sound and bugle. It's just like, wow, that's on terrible, but it doesn't sound like an inexperienced person.

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, um, if, you know, even if you can't master a perfect quintessential bugle, like, like all your favorite YouTube, um, 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 them in. Well, that's it for this episode. One thing I would definitely recommend downloading this episode and episode 96, just in case this fall you're in the back country and you're like, you know, dang it, you get stuck. You're like, how did I make, 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. Even if you're backpacked in, you'll be able to listen to it up close to you at night or something just to make sure that you're getting it figured out.

And like I 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 really move the needle to watch somebody making these rather than just hear it. You can watch me make it. You can watch what I'm doing with my jaw, my lips, etc.,

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.

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Are you looking for some great listening material for car rides this summer? We've got you covered. Meat Eaters Campfire Stories is back with its third installment, Discoveries, Revelations, and Near Misses.

There are stories here about gunshot wounds, wild archaeological discoveries, getting lost for days, hunting turkeys in a tornado, and getting an accurate premonition about a 24-point buck in a dream. Order it now. It's available wherever audiobooks are sold. And, as always, you can write into Campfire Stories at

TheMeatEater.com if you'd like to share one of your own. It's Meat Eaters Campfire Stories, Discoveries, Revelations, and Near Misses, narrated by me, Stephen Rinella.