Dalberon wrote: 
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?
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
Shut up and play.
