Help, I’ve been getting informal lessons from a local Whistler, he’s not a proper teacher just a Whistler happy to spend a bit of time giving me a hand. We started playing Greensleeves last week but he was struggling with it which meant I really struggled with it. On looking at it on my own its because there are low c note which on a d Whistle ain’t going to happen.
Is there a bit of ornamentation or trick I could do to try and hide this fact, please note I am a beginner.
Thanks in advance
Don’t know what key you’re trying to play it in that would require a low C. But if you play it in A minor (A Dorian, actually), the melody fits within the range of the whistle, no tricks required.
Agreed with the Guru here – the trick is to play the tune in a different key! If you’re using sheet music to play from, just search for “greensleeves music” and literally millions of versions will appear, many of which don’t go below low e, so no worries!
If it’s a c#, you can usually partially cover the end of the whistle with your pinky (called “stopping”) and get a pretty decent and in-tune tone. Low c will be too much of a stretch, though. (This problem can be solved very easily, however, by the simple purchase of a D+ whistle! That will give you the normal D scale plus a low c or c# at your option.)
Alternatively, you could play it on a larger whistle – this will bring the range of the whistle down to the range of the tune. (Some versions of Greensleeves descend to B, and can easily be played on a G whistle (using G fingering). I think the lower whistles also help this kind of slower tune sound the sweeter.
Which way you go will be determined only by how complicated you want the results to be!
I have to play What Child Is This every year at Christmas church gigs and yes it’s challenging.
I’ve played it both in A and in G (fingered as such, assuming a D whistle) and each key has its own pros and cons.
In A
A Cnat d e fnat e d B G A B Cnat A A G# A B G# E
A Cnat d e fnat e d B G A B Cnat A B G# F# G# A A
g g f# e d B G A B Cnat A A G# A B G# E
g g f# e d B G A B Cnat A B G# F# G# A A
It’s tricky halfholing the G#s especially going G# > E and G# > F#.
But that’s where I finger it, using whichever whistle I need to get the pitch we require at the particular gig.
I’ve also fingered it in G
*G Bflat Cnat d eflat d Cnat A Fnat G A Bflat G G F# G A F# D
G Bflat Cnat d eflat d Cnat A Fnat G A Bflat A G F# E F# G G
fnat fnat e d Cnat A Fnat G A Bflat G G F# G A F# D
fnat fnat e d Cnat A Fnat G A Bflat A G F# E F# G G
*
Yes easier overall, especially if you have a whistle that will do the crossfingered B flat well, but the 2nd part starts on a long exposed halfholed F natural, so you’d best be able to nail that pitch!
(BTW this tune is also very tricky on an uilleann chanter despite having keys for those accidentals, and tricky on the Highland pipes, which can hit all the accidentals through crossfingering but don’t have enough range.)
Just curious … in A, don’t you think half-holing for the high f nat and the G# may be troublesome for a beginner ?
There’s no high f-nat if you play it in A Dorian. And the G#s can be played as G-nats except in the cadence of each part.
That tune has tricky accidentals no matter what key one plays it in! We can’t escape that.
Play it in E minor and you have to halfhole D#'s all over the place. Play it in D minor and you have to halfhole F naturals, though it does have the advantage of having the alternating C natural / C# under the fingers with normal crossfingering.
A suitable beginner’s tune? Perhaps not, but the OP didn’t ask about that.
Yes we can change the tonality by altering the tune, however due to the nature of my gigs I have to play the actual tune as normally performed nowadays, or I will clash with the choir, organ, and other players. I would guess that even a beginner would want to play the actual tune, tricky though it be. If one doesn’t want to tackle accidentals there are plenty of tunes that don’t have them.
As it stands the 7th alternates regularly between flat and sharp (note that in the lines I used above the 7th is flat in the first half, and sharp in the second half, of each line) and I myself will only play it that way.
It makes my skin crawl to hear this tune butchered by Highland pipers who play all the 7ths flat.
Most versions I know use the f nat , and alternate between G nat and #G the way Pancelticpiper indicates. That’s the way I always played it on the guitar and the recorder. Of course as the tune is anonymous, there’s no absolute score to refer to, and everyone is free to play it the way he likes. But I find it looses its Elisabethan character when played with a flat 7th. It’s just not a dorian tune, although one may like it played this way.
Meaning that other versions you know do use the f# ?
An interesting contradiction. 
Without knowing for sure, I would bet that musicology would suggest that the tune is earlier than the Elizabethan art versions which have come down to us. And that the original Ur-tune could have been straight modal Aeolian or Dorian, without the alterations that suited Renaissance art music and its more chromatic instruments like the recorder. And these earlier setting may be more suitable for a diatonic folk whistle.
We don’t know what version the OP is attempting. I’ve heard all three - Aeolian, Dorian, and harmonic minor alterations. Of course, if you’re playing with others you want to match the setting. And if it’s the altered version, then you want the play the chromatic alterations by half-holing or cross-fingering. And as pancelt said, this doesn’t necessarily make it a suitable tune for a beginning whistler.
I mentioned the cadences as an exception above, because I’ll admit I’ve been brainwashed into wanting to hear a V - I cadence, and not the bvii - i cadence that results without the F#/G# alterations. 
What, as opposed to the version peddled by numpties like Ralph Vaughan Williams, which matches MTGuru’s Dorian-with-V-I-cadences and sounds more natural/authentic to me? Just because one reading’s been press-ganged and stuck as a Christmas carol (and I’m not even sure that the carol is always done like this) doesn’t make it the ‘actual tune’, and it seems extraordinary that folk who’d be throwing their hands up in horror at the thought of sole, definitive (‘actual’ if you like) settings of trad tunes can be pleading this for ‘Greensleeves’!
Hello whiskey9890,
Just thought I would share with you my experience. It might be of some value to you.
I haven’t been playing for long, but I went through the same kind of thing you did early on about deciding how to approach half holing.
Half-holing is something I really didn’t know how to approach right away. Inevitably I just decided to avoid it to begin with and slowly start working my way into it.
There are currently two songs I play and practice routinely that incorporate the half-holing. One is the Star Spangled Banner and the other is Yesterday by the Beatles.
I’ve had some success with the technique on these two songs for the following reasons. There is just a very minimal demand for half holing and the songs don’t call for me sustain a half holed note for very long. The more I play and practice the songs the better I get at half holing the necessary notes.
I have found half holing is skill that develops slowly and in due time. It takes a lot of discipline and patience. However, just because that is true for me does not mean it will be for you. You could be the kind of fella that has the talent the get it all sorted out in weekend. Whereas I have been working on for about a year and am far from mastering it.
I like to play Christmas music on the whistle as well and I’ve looked at the song Greensleeves before. It makes me cringe just to think about all the half holing going on there. I can’t attest to extent of every version of Greensleeves, but the versions I saw require an abundant amount of half holing. No thank you, I am not up to that challenge at this point.
One thing I think is important to point out. To me the notes that are Half Holed often sound weak and airy. This is very similar to the kind of performance that is typical when applying the cross holing technique on some whistle (or playing the C nat 0xx000).
I play Hark the Herald and I often use my Burke Low G for this purpose. The thumb hole on this whistle allows me to get a nice F natural that sounds right on par with the other notes. The more experience I get with the whistle the more fussy I get about tone quality and performance. Not that a thumbhole is necessary to get a nice sounding cross holed note. I just recently got a Chieftan V3 Low F and I must confess that the crossholed E flat is spot on in sound quality with all the other notes. Right in tune as well. My experience has been that some whistles seem to handle cross holing better than others.
So I bring this sound quality issue up only to give some insight into what I discovered with Half Holing. Because the quality of half holed note deteriorates to a degree (at least for me) I don’t really take half holing that serious and still tend to avoid it when I can. But, I take it serious enough to strategically incorporate in my practice and play.
As for me, if really want to play Greensleeves… I will break out my Melodica
Hopefully one of the groovy new Hohner Airboards with the twisty mouthpiece and funky graphics. You wouldn’t want to be behind the times when playing a 500 year old song, would you? 
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Greensleeves sounds kind of herbal to me. So I would suggest the Rasta color scheme.
Elizabethan? Nah. Or maybe this. I just can’t figure out where you blow into it.
I was just thinking of getting one and playing along with my old Augustus Pablo LPs.
There you go. Or keeping up with Jon Batiste, playing the Hooters hits, etc., etc..
My son recently “borrowed” my old Hohner. So I won’t be seeing it again for a long while. I’m looking for a deal on a Suzuki Pro 37 in its place. Cheaper than a refurbished Harmonium.
Feadoggie
Actually, you may be able to reorient the keyboard and blow into the iPhone mic to play. The whistle app worked that way. I’m not sure in this case, but maybe Michael Eskin will chime in, since he wrote this Airboard app, too.
I thought Michael Eskin might have been the author. I kind of remember him having played a role in the Hohner button box apps.
I hope we have not scared the OP away with this thread drift. Greensleeves can be a nice motivation to learn some useful techniques on the whistle.
Feadoggie
I like the idea of Greensleeves, and maybe other well-known tunes, as being pre-elisabethan and being carried along the time, while being adapted to every historical period musical standards. Some tales seem to be as old as humanity. Maybe the original version was played some millenaries ago on some kind of lithophone. In dorian mode, or in magdalenian mode, who knows…
This from Wiki:
In Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, written around 1602, the character Mistress Ford refers twice without any explanation to the tune of “Greensleeves” and Falstaff later exclaims:
Let the sky rain potatoes! Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’!
These allusions indicate that the song was already well known at that time.