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Rick, I have a question regarding your teal call. Did all you do was shorten and more dog ear the reed? I've been playing around with reeds this morning and I've got my mvp sounding like a teal but it over blows very easily. It's loud but I'm wondering if there is a way I can get it more volume without the call being so light. Been through about 5 reeds, I have sheets of mylar so it's no problem. I've shortened the reed and put an extremely heavy dog ear on it. So far this is the best way I've been able to get a good raspy teal out of it while still allowing it to keep some volume without over blowing too easily but am looking to get a little more if possible. Any advice?

I've yet to try a teal call that couldn't be overblown pretty easily and find avoiding it while still getting volume mostly a matter of presentation. Haven't tried nearly as aggressive of dog ears as you have, so you may well have a better design. Here's a photo of my current teal reed next to that call's mallard cut ("M"):



Put some "oops too far" .014 reeds from cutdown tuning up to try trimming for more teal volume but never got around to doing it. Maybe this week...

Going to have to give the 14 mil a try. I found the extremely heavy dog ears to be a little more raspy. Notice almost the same the length read on for the mallard call. Is your mvp tuned light?

Might be for some, but I don't think of that one as particularly light. That reed is from an over-bored MVP that's tuned harsher than the standard-bored one I usually usually hunt big ducks with.

Gotcha, from what I was doing with the teal reed it ended uptrading considerably shorter than my mallard reed. Just wondering based on the pic. My mvps are both over bored and cut by Butch one comp style one raunchy for hunting.

My experience has been that the harder birds are to break, the more I have to stay on them to keep from losing them to their original destination, and while I can break them farther with the over-bore, doing so doesn't always leave me the wind to horse them on in. So I'd not be at all surprised if I'm tuning my calls much lighter than you would.

(Also feel I've better luck getting reflex response to cleaner, sharper tones than the more rattling tone of a longer reed. Which finds me running a cutdown with less reed than most would, too.)