I’m new to the whistle and have been mastering a few christmas songs for the holiday season. I went to start on my next song last night and found that it called for four low C’s to be played and Im playing a D whistle. I’m figuring I’ll just have to wait until I master D and start learning C, but I just had to ask…is there any trick I can pull off to play this song on my D whistle(s)? :roll:
Thanks
Just assume your whistle was a C whistle. You’ll play everything a note higher than written, but who cares? Written C is then fingered D, written D is fingered E, written E becomes F# etc.
Sonja
Thanks Sonja. Its always the way with me to miss the obvious solutions.
Christmas in Killarney here I come.
Pitch and key are the least important concepts in music. Everything is relative. Free your mind.
(Bold statement time today, I know, but is it really not true?)
Sonja
My mind is free.
In fact I haven’t seen for some time now!
Could try playing the C as a D anyway,
and see how it sounds. Sometimes it works.
Or, play an octave higher, if there are enough
notes left in the second octave.
HTH
There are a few songs, eg, a version of Christmas in Killarney I downloaded in D, where I just throw the last 2 notes up an octave. Sometimes that sounds ok.
Or even the C as an E as there’s a row of D’s in this particular jig 
Trisha
I feel like someone is going to call me grasshopper or offer me a red pill. You guys are great. 
you should see us when we really get rolling!
Yeah, but you’ll have to finger D as D#, and G as G# (half-holing, presumably) to keep the intervals correct, essentially transposing it up a step to E Major. Or is the original written in the key of C? Or am I missing something (not unlikely)?
Just curious, but what is the song? If you are playing in a group, you can also play a harmonizing note instead of the C. I play in a couple of groups and rather than play in the second octave on those songs which have notes below the D in the first octave, I play in the first and just harmonize. Someone on the board suggested it and it has worked well for me.
Along this same line, I was wondering if it is possible to make a whistle in the key of D that included a C and a B below the D. That is, instead of the notes being (from the bottom to the top of the whistle) D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, the notes would be B, C#, D, E, F#, G, A.
I know nothing about whistle construction and not much about music theory, so if this is a dumb question, forgive my ignorance.
Dayna
Yes, that would be very possible. Nothing but (admittedly very deep) tradition requires that a whistle’s bell note be the same as the root of the key it is tuned in. However, I don’t think you’re going to see any of the commercial makers jumping on this band wagon as it would mean a whole new set of fingerings for people to learn. Kind of like switching back and forth between a Bb and a C instrument in an orchestra or between a guitar tuned in concert pitch and a guitar tuned DADGAD. Neither of those is impossible, and many professionals do that sort of thing all the time, but it does complicate playing somewhat.
I think if you were to see anything commercial it would more likely be a whistle with one or two keys to play notes below D. I.e. the whistle body would be longer and you would have a “low C#” hole that is normally open and fingering a key with your pinky closes it (I guess if you had really big hands you wouldn’t even need the key). I think someone actually has built some of these.
You can also make a whistle in minor tunings, for example. It’s all in where you place the holes…
The song is Christmas In Killarney, and you ingenious folk have gone well beyond my musical knowledge in this discussion. My fiancee was speaking a very similar version of Greek when I mentioned this solution to her. She told me something about three sharps and I gave her my best dumb look.
I have begun learning the song as Sonja recommended, and to my untrained and inexperienced ear it sounds just fine.
If anyone is interested I can post the abc for this song.
I’d like to see it…
If the tune in question is indeed http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display.php/434 you are absolutely right. I’d recommend playing it in G then instead - three notes higher than written, start with second ovtave E, use Cnat.
I didn’t look at the tune and assumed the "C"s mentioned were C naturals, and the tune probably in C major anyway.
Sorry for giving misleading tips,
Sonja
Ok folks…musical novice here doing my best to follow what your saying. First off…yes that is the tune in question. Now…if I am following you I would take the first note, which is a b, and play it as an e and this will work without attempting to half-hole notes? The way I had already begun was to play the b as a c, but this has an issue with needing too many sharp notes?
Thanks
Sonja’s point about keys and pitch being unimportant holds some of the time, esp. when you’re playing by ear. If you’re going to attempt to transpose things from sheet music, a little knowledge of keys will help.
I recommend the ear route myself, esp. if you’re a beginner. But: yes, if you play the B as a C you are in effect transposing the tune up a semitone from D major to Eb major, which you really don’t want to know about at this stage, or possibly any stage. Unless you mean C#, which means you are transposing up a whole tone into E major, which as was pointed out about is not an easy key for the whistle either.
Sonja’s suggestion is to transpose the tune into G major, which means that the only possibly unfamiliar note you will have to handle is C natural, obtained either by half-holing or “cross-fingering”.
However, I note from the music Sonja pointed to that the only low Cs in the tune are in fact C#s, and they are all passing notes (none of them very important to the melody). You can try a trick for these notes - with all your fingers down as for a low D’ curl your little finger under the end of the whistle. With a bit of practice you can get a fudgy kind of low C#.
Steve
We are confusing you, aren’t we? 
StevieJ: thanks for filling in what I again left out.
Dalberon: The general rule is that you want to play a tune in a certain key on a whistle in that (major) key. So on a D whistle you would want to play D major, E dorian, and B minor - all three scales using exactly the same notes, only using different notes as “focus” or start and end points for the scale.
However. The range of a whistle is very limited, and you often end up with tunes where you would need additional notes at the top or bottom end of the whistle to make it comfortable. The B minor I mentioned above is such a case - yes, the notes are there, but you don’t have a bottom B, so you’d have to play tunes in B minor awfully high (I’m not sure it is accidental that I don’t know any tunes in B minor).
Enter the second key a whistle can play with little hassle: the one a fourth above the key the whistle is in, the major scale starting with “upper three fingers down”, or G on a D whistle. To play in this key, you need to change one note, C# becomes C, or 000 000 becomes 0xx 000 (or any other fingering, but this is the most common one). So, on a D whistle, you have the following scales at your disposal as well: G major, A dorian and E minor (agein, A dorian isn’t too common, but it’s theoretically there).
Still with me? When you have a tune that goes below the bell note of your whistle (fiddle tunes seem to like going below D, show-offs…), you have several options:
First, check the key. The tune might not be in D major or one of the relative scales at all, but in C or Bb or something else, as I assumed yours was (sorry for not checking). In that case, my advice with ignoring keys and pitch holds, you just play the tune in D and don’t worry. You’ll have to worry when you want to play with others who don’t want to play everything in D, but you can then buy more whistles and be happy that you have a reason to do so.
Now, if the tune is indeed in D, but goes below low D, you need another strategy. To stay in D, you could use an A whistle: D is the “secondary” key on an A whistle, starting with xxx ooo, easy enough to play, and with 3 extra notes below low D you can use (which should be enough even for those fiddle tunes). If you don’t have an A whistle, you can (and that was my second suggestion) just take your D whistle and pretend it is an A. You will automagically transpose the tune from D to G then - but in many cases this doesn’t matter, e.g. when you’re playing alone.
Another strategy is playing the notes below low D an octave higher, substituting them with others, leaving them out, or showing that your little finger is longer than mine and do as StevieJ suggested.
To get the key-thing down by ear, I’d suggest taking whistles in as many keys as possible and playing “Twinkle twinkle little star” once starting with xxx xxx, once with xxx ooo by ear, remembering what these notes are called on the actual whistles (D and G on D, A and D on A, Bb and C on Bb, C and G on C, …). These are the major scales you can play on these whistles. finding the other scales (minor, dorian, mixolydian) from there is easy, but this is another story and shall be told another time 
cheers,
Sonja
You folk have officially impressed the hell out of me with how little I currently know about music. The scary part is that I am getting the general idea. I definitely need to study key’s more and understand the limits of the whistle compared to other instruments.
In the meantime Steve’s comment above interests me as I have the hands of a gorrilla. Are you saying that I would partially cover the opening at the end of the whistle and I could actually get one note lower than the d (xxx xxx) ??? I’ve been using that finger for stability, especially on the c# (ooo ooo), but I’m good with my hands and think I could work such a transition.
People collect the strangest things…