Step 1
Below is a hymn in the piano format. In most traditional hymn books, this is very similar to what you would see. From the focus point of your instrument, you first want to know where to play.
First, let us look over the piece.
We see the title at the top of the page. Below the title to the left is the poet or lyricist. On most music, only the name is shown, not whether they are poet or not, so you need to remember that poets are on the left. Below the title to the right is the composer. The composer is the person who originally created the song. Sometimes in this location, it will say, to the tune of ” “. When it says this, the poem or lyrics was set to a common song that already existed rather than composing new music. The title of the composer is often not mentioned, only the name, so you need to remember that this location is where the name of the composer is put.
Below the title, centered, is instrument information for the music. The arranger is beneath the composer. For older songs, an arranger is the person who not only sets the word order to the notes, but also considers who is playing the piece, and what the original intentions of the author were. For example, when I arranged this piece of music I thought to myself that if the original intention of the song was to for people to sing, I thought it necessary to create rests which allow a person to stop making music and breathe for a set period of time before resuming. Some references I looked at didn’t seem to consider breathing important enough to notate it.
The piece has two clefs, one which is treble which you will be familiar with from the Whistlin’ section of this website, and one bass clef. The bass clef is below the treble clef and in fact, the notes on the bass clef are lower than the notes on the treble clef. The treble clef is but 3 notes from the bass clef. The first note that sits on top the staff of the bass clef is b. The next note above that is middle c. The note that first sits below the treble clef is d. It is simply a big scale from the bottom line of the bass clef to the top line of the treble clef. A piano has all these notes, which is why when the treble clef is over the bass clef in this way, it is called the piano staff. Most instruments outside of the piano are limited to one fourth of the notes that the Piano has available to it. In this way, the Irish Whistle is like most instruments.
You may also notice that there are almost always four different notes vertically aligned with each other. Since we see the instrument of this written music is voice, and four voices at that, we can logically assume that the four different notes vertically aligned with each other are four distinct voices. Once we see that, then we can look for the voice or voices that we can play. We will see the voices more distinctly in Step 2.
The lowest note the Irish Whistle in the Key of D plays is the first note below the staff in Treble Clef, which is d. When we are looking for the voice we can play, we must pick only voices that do not go below this d.