I am just starting and my head is hurting trying to figure out the key of my newly found whistle. I think mine is a C, which would mean that with all fingers down I am playing a C as on the piano. From playing alto-saxophone its 1 fingering up, right?
I guess it works if I just pretend its a D whistle too though, right? (unless I’m playing w/ others)
The key of the whistle is the note you get when you cover all the holes. So if you get the C note, it’s a C whistle. Fingering wise, it’s like a sax, if the sax had no keys for the bottom C, B and Bb, and the lowest scale you could play was the sax’s D major (which gives you F major in absolute pitch terms if you were playing an alto).
If you want to play yr C whistle with others, but want to think in the same transposing terms as you did with a sax, you have to pretend you’re playing sop sax. The sop’s D major fingering gives the C major in absolute terms, same like the C whistle.
To use a whistle but think in alto sax terms, you need an F whistle, because if you cover all its holes, you would get an F note.
post-edit: of course, if you had whistles in almost every key, you’d just need to figure out what key everyone else was playing in, choose the whistle in that same key, and play using D major fingering 
[ This Message was edited by: tuaz on 2002-08-14 02:30 ]
Thank you! Much help! I’ll get the hang soon hopefully!