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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."
That David played, and it pleased the lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Decent idle story. Not completely retarded, though still generally meaningless. I can appreciate this kind of stuff, instead of the utter crap idle started out with. I guess it's getting better.
Why didn't anyone just ask Harrison?
Stories like this are actually interesting and have a math/science side to them, instead of being mindless humor that everyone has already seen elsewhere. This is something that a math teacher could show her students to make them interested, more so than all the silly posters and videos they used when I was going through grade school.
The Moody Blues have been in search of that little bastard since 1968. Can someone call them and tell them it was finally found?
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
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I don't get it. Why did it take me less than 30 seconds to figure out how to make anything Idle related disappear from the index, even though I'd never tried before? Please, leave the pointless bitching out off the commends. You know it's lame, we know it's lame, since it is a complete waste of time. Why let it be a complete waste of disk space, cycles and bandwidth?
Too late!
You want to talk to a human -- a musician -- when you could be performing a discrete Fourier transform? You must be new here.
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
It's a G7sus4 chord. It's never been a secret. http://guitar.about.com/library/blchord_g7sus46.htm
Then we will know for sure. It is probably the red and blue chord.
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.)
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.
...adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar.
There are no notes that are impossible to play on a guitar. However, you have to tune the guitar to a nonstandard, non eagbde like Led Zepplin did on a few songs (an example is Black Mountain Side on their first album.
I have an incredibly hard time playing a B chord; I have to kind of fake it and not hit all the strings. But then I'm no virtuoso, it took me twenty years to learn Starway To Heaven.
Free Martian Whores!
Graphic equalizers often cheat, actually.
I think the problem is a little more interesting than the story makes it out to be. As you point out, you should be able to recognize the overall chord pretty easily with an FT, but it's not quite as trivial to figure out who's playing what. For that you have to analyze the ratios of the harmonics, which turns into a nasty little decomposition problem when you've got more than one instrument playing the same note.
What did he play in concert?
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
well, it's a dead human, that ups the challenge
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.