For you guys that get the chance to run them, if you play a tongue call like you'd play a normal pot call, you probably won't care for the sound of them? A tongue call is played a bit differently. They are very sensitive to pressure, the more pressure you apply to the striker down on the tongue the higher pitched the call gets, the less pressure the deeper and raspier the call plays, you still play them the same way you'd play a pot call with how tight you'd pinch the striker, that changes the tone of the call a little bit like it does on a pot call, but a pot call doesn't come close to a tongue call in versatility. The closer you play to the hole in the tongue the louder more raspier the call gets, the farther you get away from the hole the higher more softer the tone. You can thumb a tongue call, just like you'd do on a box call, where you press your fingers against the rails on your box call and tone it down a little, with a tongue call you can lay your thumb across the tongue and completely change the tone of the call, you can also just touch the edge of the tongue and dull the sound of it just a little like you can with a box call. You can play them by moving the striker, like a pot call. or by moving the box and keeping the striker still with just a little angle on the striker, so that the striker becomes the rail of the box call and the tongue box becomes the lid of a box call. It will again change the tone of the call and produce a box call sound out of it. When I first started building tongue calls I knew nothing about them, never heard or played one. So I needed to learn, I sat watching the you-tube vids of guys play their calls, and soon found that there wasn't a call made I couldn't copy the sound of, note for note, tone for tone, no matter if it was Scott Ellis with his mouth calls or Mr. E with his Stibblings, I could copy any sound that they made with my Teasers using one call and one striker for both people. They are VERY VERSATLE in the hands of someone that knows how to run them, I know of NO OTHER CALL that you can do that with, you can make it sound like a mouth call, wingbone, pot call, box call, whatever you want it to sound like? That's why IMO I don't think they shouldn't be in the Other Pot Call category because a pot call does not have the versatility of a tongue call. When Shane first got his tongue calls, and followed our instructions, he made the comment,*These play easier than a push button call, and have 10 times the versatility of most any call*, and he had never ran a tongue call before!!! I hope the judges have a little experience with running one and not try to run one like they'd run the other pot calls, otherwise they probably won't stand a chance in that category, but who knows?
