Some tips for adding rasp to your call

It's the perfect predicament: you have a great duck call but you watch all these RNT guys putting out the nastiest, gargliest calls you've ever heard. Well, here's a tip. You can have that on your call, too. If you have a call that is kind of a loaner or you want to get a tester to experiment on, that would be a good thing to do. I use the Haydel DR-85 mallard call, my first duck call. It's a great call for under 25 bucks and is small and handy to use on the fly. What I did was take the toneboard (the surface where the reeds touch the call, kinda looks like a huge tongue) and took a file to the surface, making a few cuts on it diagonally. You may want to try thick-grained sandpaper. Don't be too harsh on it. Start out gently and try more and more grit until you like the sound of it. Tuning duck calls is all a baby steps kind of thing. Also, you may want to try cutting the top reed shorter to get more of a "sorta single" sound that Buck Gardner puts out of his calls. Do this gradually as well, since even the smallest change can make a big change in sound. Cut it by small small small degrees until you like the sound, then bend the reed tips to about a 45 degree angle or less. This will add a more nasally sound by bending the reeds. By sanding the surface of the toneboard it will add a good amount of rasp and rattle to the sound of your call. However, it will also make it go lower pitched, so if you like the current pitch of your call, you might not want to do this. If you bend the reeds downward, you screwed up because it will only deaden the call and it will jam. Call reeds are pretty plastic (literally) in how you can bend them and then bend them back to their original shape unless a tool has done a permanent bend on them. But these tips may help you add some rasp to your call and improve that ducky, nasally, gnarly gargly sound that we all hear out in the marsh. I did it with a 20 dollar duck call. Surely you can do it with yours. Give it a try!