Beatles fans have long speculated on the chord which opens “A Hard Day’s Night”. Musicians have long tried to reproduce the chord with varying degrees of success. There have been entire articles written on the subject of which notes are played. There was even recently a detailed mathematical analysis of the waveforms. Arguments on Usenet persist to this day.
My question is, why was all this endless speculation going on while the band members were still alive? Did no one think to simply ask George Harrison how he played the chord?
Everybody knows the chord. Here’s the wiki link, which does a good job…
The chord gets discussed a lot because it was “different” for the opening of a rock song, and coming along right when critics were deciding that the Beatles may be worthy of some artistic respect (“Aolian cadences” anybody?). The fact that George was newly using a Rickenbacker 12 string, which adds harmonic complexity, and Paul was playing a bass note that emphasized the complex nature of the chord just added to it.
But the real George died way back in 1968, and the other members built a robotic lookalike programmed to give misleading interviews about their songs. Don’t let the GeorgeTron 5000 fool you.
I don’t have the theory at the tips of my fingers to lay it out. And since George was self taught and made up chords, there’s probably something interesting about his fingering - and, hence, all the discussion. But the basic chord and its construction are known - I am sure that G chord is just a variant of what George said (or just another way to say the same thing). There’s definitely a sus4 in the chord which I can hear…
That’s the thing about guitar - you can have the chords in front of you, but if you don’t know the specific tricks, you won’t sound anything like the player. Knowing how to palm-mute to choke down the chords and get that rhythm-guitar chunking, or certain tricks where, because your fingers are in a certain position, you can reach up or over and make some cool sound happen - it’s not black and white, like a piano (literally or figuratively ;))
I listened to an interview with the guy who did this, and he stated very convincingly that no guitar could have played all the notes he detected, and the leftover sounds were consistent with a piano’s setup. FWIW.
“I’ve seen better people than myself argue (and in public, no less) about the exact guitar voicing of this chord and I’ll stay out of that question for now (what a cop-out, Alan!), and merely state that its sonority is akin to a superimposition of the chords of d-minor, F-Major, and G-Major; i.e. it contains the notes D, F, A, C, and G — to my ears, only the B is missing. Even if you don’t know a thing about harmony or musical dictation, you can at least hear the G as a suspended fourth over the D on the bottom. Hullaballoo aside, this chord functions as a surrogate dominant (i.e. V) with respect to the chord on G which begins the first verse.”
No such thing. The 11th and 4th are the same note; if the chord contains a suspended fourth, counting the same note as an extension (11th) is redundant. G ninth sus4 would be a possible interpretation of the chord. Calling it Dm7 (add 11) suits the dominant function better, though.
I thought the same thing initially, maybe they intended to show that the 3rd (B) was missing, as it should be in a sus4 chord.
I had heard that there is a piano involved. Like others I hear a D in the bass with G, A, C, D and F above. It’s the specific voicing that’s so tricky.
Add me to the piano crowd - I heard that the piano chord was struck slightly before the guitar, and the actually striking of the keys was edited out. (I think this was part of the analysis linked to upthread.)
Music geeks - question: so, while we might want to debate the naming of the chord (I like **Biffy’s **approach personally), isn’t the question more about the arrangement of that first chord? Isn’t the question of whether a piano is in there, or the use of a 12-string, the bass’s note - all of which appear to be defining characteristics in this mysterious chord - an arrangement question, NOT a “what’s that chord” question?
The explanation here (for those who don’t want to listen on YouTube) is that:
[ul][li]George on the 12 String playing an F Chord with a G on top and a G and a C on the bottom[]Paul playing a D on the bass[]John playing a Dsus[/li]
[/ul]
I don’t know if they’re right or not, but at the end of the discussion they play it and it damn well sounds right.
Sounds good to me. Not sure what I’d call it though. Dm7add4? D7sus4#9? (That one looks kind of stupid to me). G9sus4/D? Or does somebody hear the harmonic movement differently and wants to suggest a different spelling?
Listen Now: Hear The Interview With Math Guy Keith Devlin
According to Jason Brown of Dalhousie University, the Beatles got by with a little help from their producer George Martin (second from right).
December 27, 2008 - The jangly opening chord of The Beatles’ hit “A Hard Day’s Night” is one of the most recognizable in pop music.
Maybe it sounds like nothing more than a guitarist telling his bandmates, “Hey, we’re doing a song here, so listen up.” But for decades, guitarists have puzzled over exactly how that chord was played.
So a mathematician in Canada looked into how The Beatles produced that sound back in 1964, before the synthesizers and studio electronics available today. Host Scott Simon discusses the findings with the Weekend Edition Math Guy, Stanford professor Keith Devlin.
“Sounds themselves are very mathematical things,” Devlin says. “And that was the key to unraveling this particular mystery of this sound.”
Using sound-wave analysis based on the 1820s work of French scientist Joseph Fourier, Dalhousie University’s Jason Brown deconstructed the opening chord with the help of basic audio-editing software. Brown found that it isn’t purely guitar and bass, as previously assumed; he theorizes that Beatles producer George Martin played a five-note chord on the piano as well.
Brown isn’t done with his musical sleuthing, either. Devlin says that Brown is now using Fourier-based analysis to determine who wrote certain Beatles songs whose true authorship is in dispute, such as “In My Life.”
Click the link at the top of the page to hear the full interview with Math Guy Keith Devlin.