A piano is the secret to Beatles’ mystery ‘Hard Day’s Night’ guitar chord

Why has no one been able to re-create the late George Harrison’s opening guitar chord  on the Beatles’ “A Hard Days Night”?

More than 40 years later, a mathematical analysis reveals it’s because it’s not just a guitar making that sound. A piano is there, too.

Jason Brown, mathematics professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, applied the “Fourier transform” calculation by computer to break down the sounds in “A Hard Day’s Night.”

It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”…

Dr. Brown deduces 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. The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date, which is one reason why Dr. Brown’s findings garnered international attention.

Next time you hear that bang on Harrison’s Rickenbacker guitar (and Martin’s piano), you’ll be able to explain why that sound is unique.

Frank Warner