In this work, we propose an efficient and transparent green learning pipeline to address the automatic modulation classification (AMC) problem. This pipeline aims to enable receivers to blindly identify the modulation modes of the incoming signals in a computationally efficient way with a small model size. Our method includes the following steps. First, the input signal is transformed into a precise representation through the sparse coding method. Second, various features are extracted from the sparse coding representation with the statistics from the input signal. Third, the classification subspace is hierarchically partitioned with a tree structure to achieve a lightweight model size with good prediction accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency in classifying the modulated features and representation of received signals. Compared to lightweight deep learning models, the number of model parameters is reduced by \textbf{41\%}, while the usage of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) is only $\mathcal{O}(10^{-4})$ of the blind waveform recognition without pre-arranged knowledge of incoming waveforms.