After having played in an Irish Session for a few years, I can say that the key I feel the most left out on is D minor. So get a C whistle so that you can play D minor tunes.
You can play A tunes on a D whistle. A huge number of them are mixolydian or they simply don’t even play the G#, and for the rest, you can half-hole or cross-finger. It’s really not that hard once you get the hang of it.
If I really wanted to play A tunes without cross-fingering the G#, I’d definitely get an E instrument. Trouble is, hardly anybody makes one.
If I understand correctly, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is a minor tune. If played on a diatonic instrument whose tonic note is C, then it would be in D minor, so you would play the tune on a C whistle with your first note a D: XXXXXO.
If that first note was actually a C, then you’d be playing in C minor and you would use a Bb whistle just like you thought. The C minor scale has 3 flats. If it didn’t work, then that’s because the harmonium must have been playing in some other key entirely regardless of what any sheet music was saying about it.
I would choose A or G. I play a lot of old-time American tunes with a banjo player, who loves G. A is another popular key. I think that’s because G and A are easy to play and they might be easy ranges for many voices to sing well.
Tucson-whistler, let’s see if we can sort this out. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” is indeed in a minor key AND it happens to start and end on the tonic. There are no accidentals in the melody. If you play it on a D whistle starting with five fingers down (E) then you are playing the tune in E minor which uses the same notes at G major - you play Cnat instead of C#.
The harmoniums I’ve seen are chromatic instruments, so it really isn’t tuned to any particular key - it can play all the notes, including all the sharps and flats, in its range. If the harmonium started “God Rest Ye” on Cnat, then it was playing the tune in C minor which uses the same notes as Eb major. You would play a Bb whistle and use the same fingering as a D whistle playing in E minor. If your Bb whistle was out of tune on several of the notes, then something was seriously wrong! Either the harmonium wasn’t really playing in C minor but some other key, or somebody was badly out of tune.
Whistles are diatonic instruments and only play two major keys (and the related minors and modes) easily. A D whistle plays D major and G major, plus the related minor keys (B minor and E minor, respectively) and modes. To play with other instruments you use the whistle that matches the key of the version your band is playing. You can get other keys by half-holing and there are some folks that can do that very well. For the rest of us, we just keep a stable of whistles that cover the keys we need.
Actually, American music is in many different keys. The major keys of C, D, G, F, Bb and Eb (and their related minors) seem to be the main ones in popular and church music. Tunes in C major are in the minority, in my experience.
Sudden thought: When you say “plays in the key of C” do you mean that literally or do you mean “this is a non-transposing instrument”? Reading the rest of your post, it sounds like you are confusing the two concepts.
Thanks. It’s good to have folks validate getting those two. I also figured I’d have my hands full just learning songs with my Hi D and the alto G and A would be nice “in-between” whistles to provide some tonal variety and allow me to play in groups if I ever get to that point. I’ll leave Low D for when I need a new challenge a few years from now.
Looks like you’ve narrowed things down to a G or an A whistle. I’d vote for the A. Not so much because you can play in A, though that can be useful, but because you can play things in D that go below the low D. Very handy. It is late and I’m fuzzy so the only example I can think of right now is Neil Gow’s Lament for His Second Wife which was originally in D and lays beautifully on the A whistle.
i thought i should have included this when i first posted; i just googled the song and found this on some website for the notes:
EE BB A G F# D E F# G A B
i have no idea if they are correct, but when i play them on my d whistle it sounds alright to me.
so what i did was move to the Bb whistle so that the first note matched the harmonium player, who was playing a c. so then i get:
CC GG F Eb D C Bb C D Eb F G
so the first set of notes is E minor, and this 2nd set would be C minor? i couldn’t tell what key it was, since i never play a c (to tell if it’s flat or sharp) and it started on a
so that’s what i did, but everyone’s complaining about my flats (i think), so then i was thinking she was playing C major (no flats)–she doesn’t have any sheet music, she’s just playing by ear, and can’t tell me what key she is playing in. who knows? i googled the song and found some sheet music; it says the song is Dm but has it written in the key of F…
hey, thanks, is there any place where i can get this information written down? i have Grey Larsen’s Essential Tin Whistle book, which has helped me a lot, but he talks about ionian and mixolydian and i can’t figure out what the hell he is talking about. (ionian = major? mixolydian = ???)
you got me again. what is the difference? i think she is playing in the key of c… but a harmonium isn’t a transposing instrument, is it? i thought it was chromatic, like you said…
Your second set in C minor is correct. The first set of notes is missing an E after the first F#. If that’s a typo, OK, but if you played it that way on a Bb whistle, the rest of the notes would be off.
so the first set of notes is E minor, and this 2nd set would be C minor?
That’s correct.
i googled the song and found some sheet music; it says the song is Dm but has it written in the key of F…
That is correct also. D min uses the same key signature as F maj. In music theory terms, D min is the “relative minor” of F maj. To play along with someone using that sheet music, you would use a C whistle and use the same fingering you use on your D whistle.
I don’t know how true it is, but I was told that ALL Irish music was originally in D. Any music that wasn’t in D had to be taken from some other country such as Scotland.
I have recently bought an A whistle and I really like it. It is my favorite whistle to date.
An A whistle will play in A D and E.
It’s a crock. For the much of its existance, ITM was affixed to no particular key, usually being played solo on instruments tuned only to themselves, not to any key or pitch standard. In some counties, for instance, fiddles were held to sound better tuned down a whole tone, or more. They liked the dark colour it gave the music.
It wasn’t until factory-made instruments like the concertina and tin whistle (Uilleann pipes are not as flexible in turning as a fiddle, but were often as likely to be in flat as concert pitch) began to penetrate rural Ireland in the latter nineteenth C. that the music started getting nailed to D and it’s modal relatives.
For important collections like George Petrie’s transcriptions of much of the harp repertoire (including Carolan), for instance, the published keys are arbitrary, or were selected according to Petrie’s whim. The harpers he collected tunes from tuned their harps to nothing but themselves. Few of the harps present would have been in the same key.
i googled the song and found some sheet music; it says the song is Dm but has it written in the key of F…
That is correct also. D min uses the same key signature as F maj. In music theory terms, D min is the “relative minor” of F maj. To play along with someone using that sheet music, you would use a C whistle and use the same fingering you use on your D whistle.[/quote]
I think the easiest way to sort it out is to have the harmonium player play the first note of the tune for you and hold it. Then you get out your whistles and play XXX XXO on each one until it matches the harmonium. Then play the tune together. It hardly seems that you need sheet music for a tune like that anyway.
If you don’t have a whistle that sounds the same with that fingering, then you’re going to need a new whistle.
If her sheet music had no flats or sharps (the key signature was C), then she was playing in A minor. You’ll need a G whistle.
Get a good book on music theory. I found “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Music Theory” helpful in understanding the basic concepts. MTGuru, who has forgotten more music theory than I’ll ever learn in a hundred years, doesn’t think much of that tome or it’s sibling, “Music Theory for Dummies,” so maybe a trip to the public library might be a cheap way to look at several and find one that helps you. You can also search this forum. Modes have been the subject of a number of threads.
Some instruments in bands and orchestras use transposed music, in other words, the note that comes out of the instrument is not the note written on the page. These “transposing instruments” usually are members of a family of instruments with different ranges. For instance, clarinets come in A and Bb models; high clarinet in D and Eb; bass clarinet in Bb. Music for he clarinet is transposed so that “all fingers down” is shown as a C regardless of which instrument you are playing. That way a clarinet player can switch instruments and play the piece without having to learn a new note-to-finger position arrangement. When the clarinet player picks up a Bb clarinet, the music is transposed so that when a Bb is needed, the music says C, the clarinet player puts all fingers down and a Bb (the correct note) comes out of the instrument. When the clarinet player switches to an A clarinet, that same Bb on the score is now written as a B (one-half set up from “all fingers down”), the clarinet player plays that fingering and the Bb still comes out of the instrument.
Transposing instruments are labled by how far off the concert pitch they play. A Bb clarinet plays a whole tone lower than what is printed (Bb is one whole tone lower that C); an A clarinet plays one and one-half tones below what is printed.
Instruments that sound the note as written are known as C instruments, that is they play C when C is written. These are also known as “non-transposing instruments.”
None of this has anything to do with what notes the instrument can play. All clarinets are fully chromatic with a range on the order of three octaves.
In the whistle world, the D whistle is non-transposing. When you see a D on the page, you put all fingers down and D comes out if the whistle. This make the D whistle a “C instrument” or an instrument that plays C when C is written on the page. Many whistlers treat the whistles other than D as transposing instruments. We learn a tune in D then if we need to play in another key, we pick up the appropriate whistle and play as if we were playing a D whistle.
What this has to do with your original question is: when the harmonium player said she was playing a C harmonium, all she may have meant was that it was a non-transposing instrument.
Here is a link that may help. It is to a recorder site but their music theory section is pretty good.
who knows? i googled the song and found some sheet music; it says the song is Dm but has it written in the key of F…