I have a few old school music books with lots of different types of songs in lots of different keys in them, and I went through one yesterday, almost 400 pages, and neatly marked off each page with a D or G song with folded scotch tape (the poor person’s post-it strips).
Today I was going to try to play some of them, and almost all of them go down to the C (or B) below D, making big parts of the songs unplayable on whistle.
:bah:
You can get around this by just playing the song or parts of the songs in the second octave.
It would require a wee bit of transposing. Depending on how high the music goes.
The D key could be transposed to the key of G.
If the C note does not occure too much in the music you can fudge around with the tune and play E instead.
Actually, if you learn the art of transposing, all the songs in your songbooks could be played. And if the song/tunes have accidentals in it, you will need to get use to half holing on your whistle.
Good luck and have fun with it.
Laura
If you can find one and can afford it get yourself an ‘A’ whistle. Not only does this let you play in ‘D’ (same as ‘G’ on a ‘D’ whistle) and get those sneaky off the bottom notes but they also tend to sound better for accompanying singing.
Transposing songs is really quite easy - most singers will do it without thinking. It just seems daunting if you’re trying to write it out on paper.
Once you’ve got the basic melody so you can la-la it, just sing it in your most comfortable singing range. Chances are you’ve transposed it to do this. Most people can cover only a couple of octaves without feeling a strain, very similar to a whistle’s range. Trained singers may be able to reach 3 or 4 octaves with practise.
Untrained singers will often not be comfortable singing in the given key for a song. On a guitar the simple solution is to use a capo - for a whistler, change the whistle.
The problem we used to have in our singing class was choosing a key that would suit the deep men’s voices and the higher ladies’ voices equally.
As jbarter says, the high D is often not a good choice for accompanying singing - though I think Cran is actually just playing the tunes rather then accompanying someone.
Cran - if you do learn some songs, quita a nice thing you can do is sing a couple of verses, then play the tune through on the whistle, then sing again, then maybe switch back to the whistle for the end. Many slow airs are really song tunes, so you can get a lot of expression into the solo playing, and when singign, you will be adding ornamentation naturally that is mirrored on the whistle.