Math Prof Uncovers Secret Chord

chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."

Comments

Re:So, having Googled...

[b4dc0d3r]

There are like a million copies of this article verbatim and with the same picture. Here's his page http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/

and then find these:
http://www.guitarplayer.com/story.asp?sectioncode=8&storycode=15819
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/AHDNSoloJIB.pdf

Not so secret

[I'm a banana]

It's a G7sus4 chord. It's never been a secret. http://guitar.about.com/library/blchord_g7sus46.htm

Re:Not so secret

[Progman3K]

It's a G7sus4 chord. It's never been a secret.

Not really, the piano is playing a Dsus4.

If it was as simple as you say it is then people would have been able to recreate it long ago and no one did.

Re:Not so secret

[tompaulco]

I'm trying to picture it in my head, and It seems like you could get all of the notes from a G7sus4 and a Dsus4 in one chord on a guitar. Those would be F, G, A, C and D. Such a chord could be played with a Barre chord all on the 10th fret with or without muting the low D.
Maybe it sounds better with the piano though.

Right guy, right song, wrong story

[jfengel]

Dr. Brown's work on the opening chord of Hard Day's Night is four years old. His paper is at:

http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf

(Note the "oct04" date in the URL).

His recent work is on the same song, but it's not about the opening chord. It's about the guitar solo (which was actually a duet with the piano), which Harrison played an octave down, at half speed, and then sped up. Which he proved by noticing where the piano notes went from double-strings to triple-strings, as seen by tiny mis-tunings between the strings.

It's pretty interesting work:

http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/AHDNSoloJIB.pdf

(Note: slashdot is just reporting the article, which is new. But it comes from Dr. Brown's own school, so I don't know why they're reporting the wrong story, except to guess that the older story was a well-known mystery among guitarists.)

So What's the chord?

[jordan314]

The article doesn't actually say what he thinks the chord was. I do music transcriptions (http://jordanbalagot.com/musictranscriptions.html ) and to me it sounds like G7 sus 4 / D. Or actual pitches: D1 G2 G3 C3 F3 G3. I do hear the F in there...If it's not playable on guitar it's possible the Beatles combined two recordings at once of different takes. They used all sorts of innovative recording techniques like that.

Re:I've heard there was a secret chord

[Anonymous Coward]

It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift

Re:Not Lost, just Secret

[Abstrackt]

The fact that your post got modded informative probably means someone missed the joke. ;) (I know, I know... Or they just wanted to give you karma...)

Re:Well, this isn't total crap

[jonadab]

Theoretically that depends on the instrument, although most of the major instruments in the standard western music tradition share some of the same limitations, not least that at any given time they are either well-tempered or else justly intoned for a specific key, not both, and certainly not justly intoned for multiple keys at the same time. It is possible to design an instrument that can overcome these limitations and, for instance, play just intervals in multiple keys. But it isn't usual.