Now listening to the chord its almost impossible to NOT hear a piano..

Very interesting.

Aodan: Now listening to the chord its almost impossible to NOT hear a piano..

Jesus, you're right.

So, uh...WHAT THE HELL ARE THE GUITAR / PIANO CHORDS NEEDED TO DUPLICATE IT?!

I always thought it was a Dm7sus4.

Eat_At_Milliways: Aodan: Now listening to the chord its almost impossible to NOT hear a piano..

Jesus, you're right.

I will be dipped in shiat. No kidding ;)

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/how-a-professor.html

Link (new window)

I'm a real math-phobic, but I know the term Fourier from when I was in ultrasound school. Fast Fourier transform is used to analyze the frequencies of the doppler. Yay! Some random fact from school oozed it's way to the top of my brain.

This is my usual response:

Listen to it here, folks.. (pops)

The paper says that Harrison played ADGC on his 12-string (strings 2-5), Martin played DFDGE over
a few octaves on the piano, and Lennon and MacCartney
played a couple other notes on guitar and bass.

Well that's pretty spiffy.

I'm upset that mother didn't at least TELL US what chord it was in the article.

BONUS FOR THE THREAD: Can you hear the cowbell in the song?

absoluteparanoia: I'm upset that mother didn't at least TELL US what chord it was in the article.

BONUS FOR THE THREAD: Can you hear the cowbell in the song?

I don't know, but there should be more of it in any case.

cool

Dalhousie University is right down the road from me. But since their engineering school was our rivals, I hope they DIAF.

Being a guitar player who never reads guitar magazines, somehow missed this controversy (such as it is). However, I had always heard two instruments in that chord, a guitar and some sort of keyboard, so I found this kinda surprising. Doesn't sound to me like a straight piano though, more like an old organ with the harpsichord button on.

i think a 1st position barred G7sus4 gets you awfully close.

/hotlinked

aaaaand an even nerdier explanation here (new window)

FlashHarry: /hotlinked

FlashHarry, I smile every time I see your name. :)

hur hurr, I was told there would be no math, hur hurr

But can you hear the sailboat now?

/Schooner

i think io heard a tuba in there, also
/troll

So all this time people were trying to reproduce the studio "chord" with the observed stage instruments.

I'm surprised it took this long for someone to take a FFT of the problem.

"Find x." "Here it is."

I can't stop laughing. I'm LD about numbers, so the joke really hits home.

Who cares? The Beatles sucked.

Daredevil: I knew you were Peter Parker by comparing the sounds and rhythm of your heartbeat. They are unique and I can identify people that way.
Spider Man: That's an amazing power! What do you call it?
Daredevil: Listening.

sounds like a grandfather clock chime in there as well.

The Piano plays DFDGE which could be written:

Dmin9 add11 (no 5)

Harrison plays ADGACDG which could be written:

D7sus4/A

He completely missed the skin flute.

Trippy. I have heard that eight bazillion times and never knew.

the_be_sharps

how you do that?

Its actually easy to hear. I've never paid enough attention to notice it before, but I can't believe that someone trying to figure out the chord wouldn't pick up on the piano in there.

Didn't Harrison already answer this in an interview?

the_be_sharps: The Piano plays DFDGE which could be written:

Dmin9 add11 (no 5)

Harrison plays ADGACDG which could be written:

D7sus4/A

Or put another way, the entire C major scale except B.

The "busker's choice", a G7sus4, has been proved to be incorrect by none other than The Beatles' lead guitarist George Harrison himself. He has actually revealed what he played on his famous Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric guitar in an online chat on the 15th February, 2001:

Q: Mr Harrison, what is the opening chord you used for "A Hard Day's Night"?

A: It is F with a G on top (on the 12-string), but you'll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story.

Link (new window)

Um, maybe you're over thinking it, couldn't we just ask a Beatle? I'm fairly certain 2 of them are still alive.

Math is hard; let's go shopping.

"It took a mathematician to finally figure out the chord at the beginning of the Beatle's "Hard Days Night"

And he still got it wrong.

Q: Mr Harrison, what is the opening chord you used for "A Hard Day's Night"?

A: It is F with a G on top (on the 12-string), but you'll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story.

Source

TripSixes: http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/how-a-professor.html

Link (new window)

Sweet...much better than the article that says they found the chord but doesn't tell us what it is. Bad subby! No pudding. Just matches and candles and buns.

the_be_sharps: Harrison plays ADGACDG which could be written:



but not played without seven strings?

kidwood666: how you do that?

I just read the PDF writeup and found the notes that they wrote in there. Assuming they're correct, learning how to enharmonically spell chords was a big part of my education when I got my commercial music degree.

The overall chord is a D, which is the dominant (or 5 chord) in the key of the song (G), so in the Diatonic system, that basic chord is spelled D, F#, A. Anything extra or changed shows up in the chord symbol.

So, the piano plays DFDGE. That's a root, a minor third, an octave, a perfect fourth, and a major second. In the upper structure above the octave of the root, the scale tones are written as 9 (for 2), 11 (for 4), and 13 (for 6, but rarely). So, that's a D minor chord without the fifth (no A note) with a ninth and an eleventh. A common way of denoting that chord, then, is Dmin9 add 11 (no 5). I guess you could call it a Dmin11 (no 5) as well, but as I think about it, there's no seventh scale tone (no C) which would mean probably the most elegant way to write the piano chord would be:

Dmin11 (no5, no7)

Then for the 12 string guitar, George is playing ADGACDG. That's something different in the bass of the chord, we'll get to that in a second. He's playing D, G(4), A(5) C(dom 7). Some of the notes are doubled, they won't need to be written twice in the chord symbol. DGAC spells a D dominant 7 chord with the major third suspended to a 4th, thus D7sus4. Since he selected a voicing of the chord with the root not in the bass, we write that as a "slash" chord, meaning the chord with another note in the bass, and it gets written like a fraction, so us stupid bass players can easily read charts.

D7sus4/A

Also, it's interesting to see that John only plays one note. That C natural further establishes the fact that this chord is most definitely a dominant seven chord, and further builds the musical tension that is released with the first G chord of the song.

If I were playing this song onstage, I'd play a Dmin9 chord for two reasons. One, got all the good color notes (D, F, A, C, E), and that's probably what James Brown would want.

thesubliminalman: but not played without seven strings?

Twelve string guitars have at least 7 strings.

ABRACADABA

absoluteparanoia: Can you hear the cowbell in the song?

Uh yeah, I figured everyone could.

Or you could just listen to the bootlegs of the session tapes before the piano overdub.

pjc51: Or put another way, the entire C major scale except B.

Enharmonically written, yes, and even though the Beatles are well known for their exploration of modes, this is not an accurate description of what's happening in the song. It's the intervals between the notes that makes it sound significantly different than just walking up to a piano and ham-handing it. Those guys are definitely playing D chords, and the net result is definitely a D chord, and it's not a D minor chord which is what "lives" in the C major scale. It's important to note that the D in the bass is the most important note, because it establishes that this is the dominant chord for the key of the song. It's also interesting to see that this is a dominant chord without a tritone (F# and C), which is normally what makes dominant chords "dominant" sounding.

thesubliminalman: Was it some kinda really odd tuning?

That seems to be the consensus. I was just commenting on how to write the chords in the articles.

the_be_sharps: thesubliminalman: Was it some kinda really odd tuning?

That seems to be the consensus. I was just commenting on how to write the chords in the articles.

I guess I have to go with the idea that between 2 guitars a bass and a piano anything is possible (not to mention overdubs) but it is a killer way to start a song ain't it! (especially way back THEN)

thesubliminalman: I guess I have to go with the idea that between 2 guitars a bass and a piano anything is possible (not to mention overdubs) but it is a killer way to start a song ain't it! (especially way back THEN)

Regardless if you like the Beatles' music, it is undeniable that they were the most experimental form of popular music since Debussy, and one of the huge contributors to modern Western (hemisphere) music. Many musicians "hate" the Beatles, and the Eagles, for that matter. I am convinced that those musicians hate the writers for coming up with songs that are so damned hard to play, but sound so easy to play!

that's weird
I recently thought about this very thing, the other day, and I thought to myself at the time, "it's probably just two guitars playing slightly different chords, but mixed close together or something, making one bizzarre mystery chord"