I just started learning to play the tin whistle 2 weeks ago since I finally found a tutor ( he’s the best whistle player in the country too! ) .
Well he started teaching me musical notes and such ( only G and D scale so far ) …
my question is this - whats the difference between the scales ? G and D seems pretty much the same to me except that D has a C sharp and G has a C natural …
they depend on which note a song starts on, and each of them have different sharps and flats.
I really don’t know much about the technical aspects of why each one is what it is, but maybe that helps…
G and D seems pretty much the same to me except that D has a C sharp and G has a C natural …
They are exactly the same apart from the difference you mention!
The short anwer to your question is that a particular type of scale (for example, a major scale) is composed of a series of whole tones and half-tones that follow on from each other in the same order - no matter whether it’s G major or D major or any other major.
When you start a major scale on any particular “home” note (say G or D) you have to use certain notes to make the proper sequence of whole tones and half-tones. That’s basically why some scales have more sharps (or flats) than others.
I think that’s a good start. Learn the G & D major scales to be going on with, as your teacher has suggested. There are others that you can get into later on.
Does this help?
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-04-02 22:10 ]
telegram tks for the reply but I believe thats not always the case ( at least according to my teacher ) .
stevieJ I have no idea what whole notes and half notes are yet 
maybe I just dont have any theoretical knowledge yet to understand the difference between scales?
It’s probably a little early in your learning to understand the differences between scales - there are a lot of them - since you aren’t yet sure of what whole and half steps are - the best way to learn that is by listening.
When you practice your scales (and I hope you do), play the scale slowly and listen to the difference in tone between the notes you play - for instance, the third note (F) doesn’t sound quite as far away from the E as the E was from D; and the C# is closer to the next D than, say, the A was from the B.
There’s an easy way to remember the half steps in every major scale:
D major: base note (D), whole step (E), whole step (F#), half step (G), whole step (A), whole step (B), whole step (C#), half step (D octave)
Here’s something that will help even better, maybe, called solfege - do you know your do, re, mi’s? It works for every 8-note scale:
The base note is do (dough), next is re (ray), then mi (me), fa, sol, la, ti (tee), do:
do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti, do
“fa” and “ti” in major scales are the half steps.
Major scales are always identified by the “do” note - in F major, the “do” note is F, the two half step notes are “fa” (Bb in this case), and “ti”, which is E. The “key signature” for the F Major scale has one flat, the Bb.
With this information, you can construct ANY major scale and even determine its key signature. (By the way, there was a recent thread dealing with key signatures - use Search to check “flats” or “sharps”
and you should find it.)
It’s easy to visualize this on the piano if you have some sort of rudimentary knowledge of how to play, but listening to your scale notes as you play the whistle and saying “do”, “re”, “mi”, etc., as you go up and down the scale in both octaves will help you more in the long run.
Could anybody possibly quess that I used to be a music teacher (and loved it) 
This answer is probably way to technical for a beginner, but it’ll give you some buzzwords to remember. The main difference is obviously the fact that the key of ‘D’ has a C sharp in it. If you start on a G, and play A, B, C, D, E, F sharp, and G again, you’ve got a G scale. But you do the same thing, and this time start on D you get a different sound and are actually playing a scale that is neither D or G, it is a mode of D. Depending on what key signature you use, and what note you start on, you can get a lot of different sounds with the ‘same’ key.
On 2002-04-02 23:04, Kendra wrote:
(snip)
It’s easy to visualize this on the piano if you have some sort of rudimentary knowledge of how to play,
(snip)
Even if all you can do is identify a note, any note, the piano keyboard is helpful because every key is one half-step away from the two keys on either side it, whether they’re black or white.
To give what’s probably the easiest example, if you start with a C and follow the pattern for a major scale that Kendra gave of whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half, that’s all white keys.
You’ll see that to get from C to D you have to skip over a black key (C# or Db - there’s a nasty potential footnote to that but I don’t want to scare you; for your practical purposes they’re the same thing). That’s a whole step, two half-steps, white (C) to black to the next white (D). Then there’s another black key between D and the next white key, E. That’s the second whole step.
Now, notice as you keep going up that there’s no black key between E and the next white key, F. There’s that first half step in the pattern.
And so on up the scale.
The D scale works the same way, with the whole-whole-half-etc. deal, but starting on D instead of the C in the example above. Because of the arrangement of black and white keys, you’ll be hitting two black keys, the F# and C#, and five whites, D, E, G, A, and B, instead of all 7 white keys.
Find yourself a keyboard, or even a picture of one with the notes labelled, and that might help you understand this weird scale stuff better.
Hope this helps.
John