How long would you say it took you to learn to run a trumpet good enuff to where you felt confident hunting with it?
It only took a couple of weeks for me to get comfortable enough with my yelps and clucks, which is all I need to hunt with anyway. Now a kee-kee and purrs still ain't happened. I have heard tell that some folks it takes a year or so to learn how to yelp on one, so I consider myself lucky.
2 years give or take, to be proficient.....I could make yelps after the first week but not to the point of being confident. Now I can run the whole show on one and will never be without one.
I started making trumpets about a month before the Spring 2008 season. I was able to get gobblers to respond but didn't kill any that first spring. By the next Spring the trumpet was far and away my most effective call in the woods and I've taken multiple birds with it every year. It's hard to say how many hours I put into practicing because I naturally practice by testing out everything I make. For me the effectiveness of this call in the woods far outweighs the long hours it takes to become proficient.
Barry, I took to it pretty quick. I felt good enough within about two weeks.....but Im phsyco when I want to learn a new call and I was probably running it on and off for about 5 hours a day.
The good news is, once you finally train yourself how to run it, it comes easy. Sometimes it is the trumpet and not the user. Some run easier than others. Brians are very easy to run, so is Crawdad.
I'll let you know if I ever get to that point. :help:
I put in a lot of hours in the few months leading up to last season but had no confidence in it until I got the first turkey to respond. I think I sound a lot more like a turkey now than during this past season, but I doubt the turkeys will like it any more than they did? Del took to it really fast, but I bet he ran it ten or twelve hours that first Saturday he had one. When I talked to him his lips were blistered. The hardest thing for me was realizing how little air it requires and your lips and mouth have to be totally relaxed. I think my yelps got a lot better in the last few weeks after eight or nine months running them nearly every day. A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to run a Buice trumpet and with the #4 mouthpiece it matched my air flow right and I got the best yelps to date for me. Since then I have learned to get similar results with several other trumpets. I can't kee kee consistantly, but I don't work on it because I don't use it hunting.