Easy-to-follow tips from Cody McCarthy on how to use a turkey mouth call

Hey guys, what’s up? It’s Cody with Slayer Calls. Today,

I’m going to teach you, to the best of my ability, how to operate a Slayer turkey mouth call. Turkey calls can be beginner, intermediate and they can be advanced…BUT all the principles that I’m going to teach you are all relatively the same foundational skills you’ll need to progress. 

First, we want to start off with our air presentation. Our goal is to produce hot air…like you’re fogging up a window…you should feel it. If you’re blowing, you’re not gonna get the right sound; cold air will not make the right sound. We want to put the diaphragm in our mouth using slight tongue pressure to create the very high note that you’re looking for when turkey calling. And then as you go, depending on the sound, you just want to increase the air pressure. Once you make that sound, that’s your base for just a basic hen cadence and that’s gonna be pretty much your go to call. If you can yelp like a hen turkey, you’re going to get responses and that’s going to be a very important sound to make.

The next sound I want to teach you to make is the cut. This is the excited sound…so when that hen is like “no, no, no, no, I don’t want to go over there, I want you to come to me,” you’re going to make this very sharp sound. This sound, the majority of the time, is going to trigger a gobbler. They love that excited cutting sound. Then, you can mix in your yelps with some cuts. Putting these two sounds together will help you kill more turkeys.

The next sound I want to teach you is the purr. Put the diaphragm in your mouth and roll your tongue. Then speed it up…if you make this sound faster, you have a fighting purr. But if you just throw in those little soft purrs and a little bit of cutting, you’re going to trigger the gobbler. The last thing I want to teach you is the key key run. This is the sound a Jake and a mature hen will make. Its key key, key, key, key key. To make this call, you’re going to push your tongue up onto that latex. The key key run is also a very high pitched call that’s going to carry through the woods and trigger a gobbler.

Shop Slayer’s lineup of turkey mouth calls.