Chapter 13 Flashcards
A Hard Day's Night Chord -Rocks Holy Grail
Among the litany of adjectives used to describe the chord, Adrian Thrills’ ‘invincible’ says it all. Certainly, in terms of heated debate over its constituent notes and precise construction (not to mention ‘correct’ name), there’s nothing to touch it anywhere in rock.
That chord - the nominations are …
By the time we kick into touch The People’s Choice, ‘G7sus4’, guilty as we’ll explain, of a sin of both omission and position , we’re left with barely a handful of realistic descriptions from our panel of experts, and most of those fall frustratingly shy of a name and shape. This might seem like nit-picking, but surely this definitive Beatles mystery needs solving. However, as we may have guessed, this is easier said than done. The dedication of a complete chapter to barely three seconds of music may smack of self-indulgence, but these complex textures genuinely require the most intricate of jigsaw puzzle approaches to piece together.
George’s shape emerges - perhaps surprisingly - as a not - so -dramatic, easily-fingered F major triad with added 9th , played in first position on the guitar (however, for man y this alone constitutes a piece of controversy - to which we shall be returning)
At this point some readers may be skeptical as to the validity of this chord. Certainly if you expect it to match the sound you hear
pounding through your speakers on the original single, or soundtrack album, you’re going to be disappointed.
This is for many reasons, starting with the fact that , in the case of a 12-string guitar , the ‘top four strings’ actually means the top four pairs of strings. This combination of octave and unison tunings has vital sonic ramifications, and means that we will struggle to duplicate the sound on any 6-string instrument. Here is tablature and music notation that shows why those ‘ doubled’ notes are so vital to the texture of the chord.
The jangly coda: F added 9th as an arpeggio
Just as Harrison himself pointed out , we don’t get the whole story without McCartney’s bass contribution, a resounding D note with which he opens the whole saga. This vital punch is heard clearly on the BBC version as a low D (at the 73 Hz frequency, as we must crucially specify at this point) on Paul’s Hofner electric bass, and puts another spanner in the works
In search of the piano voicing
The buskers’ choice: G7sus4
The combination cadence - the case for Fadd9 /D
The right-hand channel revisited - the piano’s harmonic maelstrom
It is the strange melting pot of shifting sounds in the right-hand channel that causes us to question all our earlier judgements of the chord - both in terms of the final line- up of instruments and the collection of notes present.
A twist of Lennon - John ‘s hidden voicing: G/F Video footage would have saved us all a lot of time and aggravation, but Sod’s Law dictates that the title track itself is the only song on the A Hard Day’s Night rockumentary that The Beatles did not perform on camera.
Dig out your copy on Anthology 1, track 12. Not only is Fadd9 the second chord that greets us in this highly novel rhythm guitar intro, but the opening sound is John Lennon playing none other than the exact four-string, droning G/F that can arguably be extracted from the right- hand channel of the soundtrack version of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. Interestingly, MacDonald even makes a point of singling out Lennon’s rhythm guitar figure in ‘Cry For A Shadow’ as the song’s ‘only musical point of interest’ And what a coincidence that this instrument al is credited as a unique joint composition by John Lennon and George Harrison! Is it possible that the origins of the ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ intro date back to the very earliest excursions in Hamburg? ‘Cry For A Shadow ‘ (rhythm guitar intro)
‘A Hard Day’ s Night’: that chord … (probably!)
For it is in this way that the chord is indeed ‘the musical equivalent of the song’s title,’ just as Hertsgaard says, with the consonant
B struggling for respite beneath the tense suspension as surely as the singer craves a break from his labours
