Opening Chord To "Hard Days Night"

[gavspen]

Inquiring minds want to know.....

Jeez...so I'm the only inquiring mind around here?

[Movies]

THIS JUST IN!

Houston's analysis completely blows Brown's theory out of the water!

[Phil O]

Why doesn't somebody just ask Paul?

[Shooshie]

THIS JUST IN!

That was one LONG article, and almost infinitely tedious. His math isn't bad, but the guy knows next-to-nothing about music. He continued to make the same mistake over and over and over, which is to believe that a fundamental has to be louder than its harmonics.

Then he neglected to consider that the sound on the CD he was holding has been processed maybe even a dozen times before reaching his ears. Oh, he gives lip service to a passing notice of that fact, but then he continues on as if we can just ignore that part. Then, when his "version" sounds totally different from the recording, he just says "I know, more bass."

I have some advice for anyone (but especially a non-musician/non-recording engineer) who wants to create the DEFINITIVE explanation for the opening chord on Hard Day's Night: DON'T. For goodness sake! DON'T!!!

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Music is like rocket science, nuclear physics, organic chemistry, theoretical math, brain surgery, and economics: the difference between the knowledge base of a neophyte and that of an old-hand, even one who doesn't consider him/herself an 'expert,' is vast, with a huge emphasis on that word VAST! You can't dabble in it and understand all that goes into it. When a neophyte and someone like one of us in this forum sit down together and listen to the same song coming out of the same speakers, the difference between what each of us hear and think would probably fill books. Seriously, every article I've read on that opening chord of Hard Day's Night has been about as interesting and about as accurate as I'd expect from those same people's descriptions of the first heart transplant, based on their having read a biology textbook 20 years ago.

Sadly, this is probably why top musicians are underpaid, under-rated, and under-appreciated. In my career I've run into countless people who choose other careers after having been in a garage band as a kid, and who now think that they've "done both." There's nothing quite like getting sized up and ranked, musically, by a lawyer, doctor or banker. Doctors can be the worst; they absolutely have no doubt that they know everything you know. Lawyers may be smarter, but their goal isn't to BE better than you, just to win the argument. Bankers? They tend to think that the one with the most money is always right, no matter the subject. Yeah, sure, I'm stereotyping, but I've had an interesting career that has put me in social situations with a lot of these people, including CEOs of many major corporations. OH... the CEOs are interesting. You're supposed to agree with them and compliment them on how right they are. When you don't, you get this "look." It's the look of a father who's just about had enough of his smart-ass kid, the look right before he raises the back of his hand threatening the next bit of disrespect. Of course, he doesn't raise the hand. He merely looks at his handlers as if to say "get me another party guest," and in seconds he's talking to someone else. I don't know; I've had feedback from 3rd parties later who told me that such CEOs were very impressed with me, should I ever want to consider working for them. Yeah... right. So maybe it's not over-confidence in their case, but just knowing to cut their losses when they're being outgunned.

But generally, people think musicians strum these instruments, and these instruments just make all this music with very little direction from the player. The fact that it doesn't happen when THEY strum the same instrument is no contradiction; they assume there's a small learning curve as you learn which buttons to push, which keys to press, and that sort of thing. Perhaps a better analogy is in singing. Karaoke proves that people of all types think they can sing. Yet when they are placed next to someone who does it every day, at the top of their game, it proves quite otherwise.

Nobody likes a know-it-all, and nobody wants to listen to someone who is sold on themselves, but everyone has opinions about music, and the last thing they want to hear is a real musician contradicting those opinions. The real musician isn't seen as knowledgeable, but 'annoying.' "He thinks he knows all about the Beatles." No, but I damn sure can hear more in one second of that opening chord than these guys who spent weeks researching it and writing about it. Sorry; that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

Here's the thing. Given what I know and the tools I have at my disposal, I could probably create a reasonable copy of that recording in... I don't know, maybe a few hours. Maybe even a few minutes. (probably a few hours) But even if I made the copy sound perfect, even if it fooled the ears of everyone in this room, I still could not tell you exactly who played what. The reality could always be a little different. There's a phenomenon called "masking," which is one of the keys to making compression codecs, which virtually assures that nobody can perfectly deconstruct music. Nobody. You may even guess it right most of the time, based on your knowledge of arranging and music theory, but you can't ever be 100% sure. Nobody. Never. You may as well predict how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (whether or not you believe in angels), for there simply is no answer. That bit of information has been lost in the mix.

Shooshie

[Phil O]

Here's the thing. Given what I know and the tools I have at my disposal, I could probably create a reasonable copy of that recording in... I don't know, maybe a few hours. Maybe even a few minutes. (probably a few hours) But even if I made the copy sound perfect, even if it fooled the ears of everyone in this room, I still could not tell you exactly who played what. The reality could always be a little different. There's a phenomenon called "masking," which is one of the keys to making compression codecs, which virtually assures that nobody can perfectly deconstruct music. Nobody. You may even guess it right most of the time, based on your knowledge of arranging and music theory, but you can't ever be 100% sure. Nobody. Never. You may as well predict how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (whether or not you believe in angels), for there simply is no answer. That bit of information has been lost in the mix.

Shooshie

Thank you, thank you, thank you. That SO needed to be said. As musicians and/or engineers, we really need to understand this.

Philippe

[Phil O]

Why doesn't somebody just ask Paul?

from 2013:

P.S. Why dont we just ask Paul what that chord was?

Guess I was late to this game. Sorry gavspen, didn't mean to steal your words.

[bayswater]

Why doesn't somebody just ask Paul?

I thought someone did. Anyway, how likely is it he would remember? It was probably one of a zillion things he did that day, and of no particular significance at the time.

[mikehalloran]

I dunno... When Paul was on The Daily Show last night, I kept expecting Jon Stewart to ask him.

But nooooo.....

[Phil O]

Why doesn't somebody just ask Paul?

I thought someone did. Anyway, how likely is it he would remember? It was probably one of a zillion things he did that day, and of no particular significance at the time.

I bumped into Tony Trischka once at a bar where he was playing (how that happened is a story for another day). But anyway, we got to talking, I told him I was a fan and had been working on one of his compositions, Soddy Daisy. He walked to the stage, grabbed his banjo, walked it back to me, plunked it in my lap and said, "Show me what you're working on. I've forgotten how that goes."

[billf]

Why doesn't somebody just ask Paul?

Apparently someone did ask George what he played:

The exact chord is an Fadd9 confirmed by Harrison during an online chat on 15 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, but you'll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story.

• George Harrison: Fadd9 in 1st position on Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string electric guitar
  John Lennon: Fadd9 in 1st position on a Gibson J-160E 6-string acoustic guitar
  Paul McCartney: high D played on the D-string, 12th fret on Hofner 500/1 electric bass
  George Martin: D2-G2-D3 played on a Steinway Grand Piano
  Ringo Starr: Subtle snare drum and ride cymbal

Source: Pedler, Dominic (2003). The Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles. Omnibus Press. ISBN 0-7119-8167-1

And there is this bit:

This gives the notes: G-B-D-F-A-C (the B is a harmonic). One of the interesting things about this chord is how McCartney's high bass note reverberates inside the soundbox of Lennon's acoustic guitar and begins to be picked up on Lennon's microphone or pick-up during the sounding of the chord. This gives the chord its special "wavy" and unstable quality. Pedler describes the effect as a "virtual pull-off"

[Movies]

That was one LONG article, and almost infinitely tedious. His math isn't bad, but the guy knows next-to-nothing about music. He continued to make the same mistake over and over and over, which is to believe that a fundamental has to be louder than its harmonics.

Then he neglected to consider that the sound on the CD he was holding has been processed maybe even a dozen times before reaching his ears. Oh, he gives lip service to a passing notice of that fact, but then he continues on as if we can just ignore that part. Then, when his "version" sounds totally different from the recording, he just says "I know, more bass."

I have some advice for anyone (but especially a non-musician/non-recording engineer) who wants to create the DEFINITIVE explanation for the opening chord on Hard Day's Night: DON'T. For goodness sake! DON'T!!!

I don't mean to sound argumentative, Shooshie, but did you read the full article? A significant portion of his argument is that fundamentals DO NOT have to be louder than their harmonics (due to EQ and other factors). It's one of the load-bearing elements of his thesis; he explicitly uses that point to explain where people like Brown have gotten it wrong.

He also theorizes, as have others, that the entire first chord was supplemented by a second version pitched down a full octave, which is where the extra bass might come from.

I definitely understand if you think the whole project of analyzing music in this way is tedious, worthless, or boring. I think it's really exciting, though, and I thought that this was a particularly rigorous and interesting exploration. I'm pretty sure that whatever the thing is that people get out of reading John Grisham books, I get it out of reading stuff like this.

[Shooshie]

That was one LONG article, and almost infinitely tedious. His math isn't bad, but the guy knows next-to-nothing about music. He continued to make the same mistake over and over and over, which is to believe that a fundamental has to be louder than its harmonics.

Then he neglected to consider that the sound on the CD he was holding has been processed maybe even a dozen times before reaching his ears. Oh, he gives lip service to a passing notice of that fact, but then he continues on as if we can just ignore that part. Then, when his "version" sounds totally different from the recording, he just says "I know, more bass."

I have some advice for anyone (but especially a non-musician/non-recording engineer) who wants to create the DEFINITIVE explanation for the opening chord on Hard Day's Night: DON'T. For goodness sake! DON'T!!!

I don't mean to sound argumentative, Shooshie, but did you read the full article? A significant portion of his argument is that fundamentals DO NOT have to be louder than their harmonics (due to EQ and other factors). It's one of the load-bearing elements of his thesis; he explicitly uses that point to explain where people like Brown have gotten it wrong.

He also theorizes, as have others, that the entire first chord was supplemented by a second version pitched down a full octave, which is where the extra bass might come from.

I definitely understand if you think the whole project of analyzing music in this way is tedious, worthless, or boring. I think it's really exciting, though, and I thought that this was a particularly rigorous and interesting exploration. I'm pretty sure that whatever the thing is that people get out of reading John Grisham books, I get it out of reading stuff like this.

I think I did read it all. I may have skipped through some parts where I thought I could see where he was going, but I don't think I skipped entire paragraphs or pages. He gave lip service to the possibility that harmonics can be louder than fundamentals, but then over and over he committed errors based on the assumption that the fundamental WILL be louder. It's quite common to see instruments whose first harmonic (the octave) is louder than the fundamental. It produces a certain timbre. A stopped cylindrical pipe, which overblows at the 12th, is often the result of that octave + 5th being equal to or slightly louder than its fundamental.

It's been a week or so since I read it, so I'm not going to remember all the little details that stood out to me as naive or uninformed, but I remember their being many in number.

I understand the excitement of forensic analysis of sound, and even of musical audio, but I'd be much more excited about it if it were producing something factual, something that in the end is not merely guesswork decorated with math, which I sincerely believe this is. I'm not one to put down something that is worthy. I think this guy has a good mind and applied it to the best of his ability and knowledge, but I also believe that most trained musicians/engineers would wince at his errors as I did. I don't think you are being argumentative, but are indeed excited about learning the author's methods and processes.

Acoustics is a branch of physics, which is littered with the carcasses of brilliantly worked-out proofs based on inaccurate starting data or assumptions. Sometimes that leads to someone else fixing the errors and making the discovery, but most often it just yields some initial excitement until someone comes along and shows the errors, which pretty much ends the story. I think this is one of those cases. It's not without merit, not without interesting knowledge if you don't already know about the historical figures involved. But its weaknesses are just overpowering, long before he gets to the end.

Let me drop one thought into the mix: what you hear when you listen to a recorded album on your stereo is vastly different from what I hear on mine, or your friend hears on his, or his girlfriend hears on hers. The kid with the ghetto blaster hears something entirely different, too. The difference is so pronounced that this kind of analysis is doomed from the start. You cannot reproduce the original circumstances when you're looking at it through a filter that dramatically alters what you are hearing. Those filters include (from original sound to what reaches your ears) at least the following things, and maybe more:

• • The amplifiers used to produce the sounds from the guitars
  • The room in which it was recorded
  • The microphones used to pick up the sound from the amplifiers
  • The mixing board (or facsimile thereof) used in the control room
  • The tape recorder
  • The tape
  • Any compressors, limiters, EQs, echo units, reverb, etc. that may have been used by the engineer
  • The lathe used to cut the master for records (must be calibrated for phase and amplitude)
  • The quality of the vinyl by the time it reached your turntable
  • Your turntable, tonearm, cartridge, and stylus
  • Your electronics (huge variables here)
  • The speakers/headphones you are using
  • The room in which you are listening
  • The state of your mind and ears (are you sober, inebriated, high, angry, sad, excited, tired, sleepy, just awakened, etc.)

Any and all of the above can produce quite a different listening experience. When you hear the recording the author made of HIS version of "what happened that day," you realize that he's not even in the ballpark. Not even close. Nor can he be, based on what I listed above.

I didn't even mention the voicing of each chord and part: that includes the strength with which each note was strummed or struck, as well as the balances set by the engineer. Is he going to guess each of those?

And you will recall that I mentioned masking as the phenomenon that acts as a one-way door. The sound can get out, but you can't get in to see or hear exactly what went into producing that sound. Masking forbids it. Masking is the phenomenon that, in essence, says that loud sounds prevent you from hearing quiet sounds. We all assume that those quiet sounds are in there doing their jobs, creating little fluctuations, timbral shifts, tuning beats, and such, but masking makes it impossible to determine the exact nature of each of those quieter sounds and their relationships to the overall sound picture. In the end he can make guesses about what he's hearing, but despite all his math, physics, and methodology, in the end he is guessing.

It's not my purpose to be the downer guy who pokes holes in someone else's theory. It's just that this kind of thinking can set a lot of people on the wrong path in learning audio. If you believe that this guy actually knows a lot about audio, and that you are the student learning from the master, then you'll be making mistakes for years because of it. I point this stuff out for the benefit of those with eyes to see and ears to hear: this is folly, and chock full of error based on inadequate understanding of the subject matter in which he is dealing. Be wise and learn to dodge these kinds of errors. That admonition is my only purpose. Enjoy his math. Enjoy his enthusiasm. But understand why he fell so far from the mark in the end. Lessons like this can save you time, money, frustration and sanity.

My opinions, only...

Shooshie

[Movies]

If I'm understanding you correctly, you seem to be making a few different arguments.

1. That there's no way to ever know what the correct answer is, so why bother trying to say anything definitive on the subject.

2. That non-musicians, nearly one-hundred-percent of the time, fail in their analysis of musical ideas.

3. That the author of the article makes mistakes serious enough to undermine his credibility/thesis.

In response, I'd say:

1. The concept of attempting to come up with workable answers to questions like this is fun and interesting. To me, it's just this sort of reasoning (or attempt at reasoning) that is missing from most of the conversations I hear in my day to day life.

2. This is, of course, a matter of personal opinion, but with regard to wave-behavior and frequency analysis, I think I'd probably side with the mathematicians over the musicians most of the time. Granted, with regard to the actual techniques of audio engineering, I'd guess that many of them would be in the dark. One of the reasons I found this piece so compelling, though, is that the author really appeared to do his homework.

3. You've mentioned the fundamental issue, but it's a total misrepresentation his position. To me, the payoff of the piece -- and the real new development in the history of the analysis of the chord -- is that certain pitches have been EQed in such a way that harmonics are louder than the fundamental. If you command/control+F for "Fundamental," you can see that it's right in there toward the end, which I'll re-produce here:

"The problem is then, why is the D3 harmonic louder than the D2 that caused it? Harmonics tend to be lower in volume than the fundamental note. How to solve this puzzle? Well, music producers alter the volumes of individual instruments to produce a nice mix. They also alter the volume of frequency ranges. A bass guitar is a powerful instrument and if you don’t turn down its lower end frequencies then the sound can be indistinct, it sounds ‘muddy’. If someone recorded a D2 and turned down the frequencies around D2 but not the higher ones then the loudest frequency would in fact be a harmonic, such as a D3. Furthermore, the note heard might sound like a D3 and not the true one, the D2!"

So, I guess, my question is, setting the assumption of the behavior of fundamentals aside, what mistakes/missteps do you see that don't add up? Or, a better question maybe would be, how would an audio engineer or musician tackle this problem that would give a better, more thorough answer?

And just for the sake of clarity: I'm functioning under the belief that there's a big difference between creating a recording that sounds exactly like the chord in question and figuring out exactly what the chord was. That is to say, just because his recording didn't sound like an exact reproduction doesn't mean that his analysis was incorrect (and, consequently, doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to create one that, to most ears, DOES sound just like it in a few hours).

[Shooshie]

In the end, it comes down to your core set of beliefs, combined with a bit of acquired knowledge. The important thing is that you enjoyed it.

For the record, I always side with the math... when it's right. There's nothing wrong with his math. Richard Feynman would have told you that the math is a language for describing something you can work through mentally, but for which there are no words to explain it. He would have made sure you know that understanding the variables is important, for without clearly seeing the relationship of the variables, the conclusion may well be in error. He was a stickler for people who hid behind math without truly understanding what it was saying, or what it had left out. Were he looking at this, I think he would have gotten as far as the masking problem, then said that whatever conclusion you make after that point may arrive at the right answer, but not necessarily for the right reasons. That is not a condition that satisfies a physicist.

As for the fundamental/harmonic thing, when taken in context of the whole article, the paragraph you cited seemed to be a "fix," a guess that he hopes corrects wherever he went wrong previously. I've no interest in digging around in the article and debating this. It's just not a big deal. From an entertainment point of view, however, he set out to write an article of interest to a certain cross section of people, and he succeeded at that. Bravo to him!

And just for the sake of clarity: I'm functioning under the belief that there's a big difference between creating a recording that sounds exactly like the chord in question and figuring out exactly what the chord was. That is to say, just because his recording didn't sound like an exact reproduction doesn't mean that his analysis was incorrect (and, consequently, doesn't mean that you wouldn't be able to create one that, to most ears, DOES sound just like it in a few hours).

Oh, I'm sure you're right about that. The bottom line from my perspective is that Masking prevents any conclusive proofs about what happened that day. We can guess pretty darn close, however, just by listening to it. Most of what he described was pretty evident just by listening to it. But like every other listener stumped by this — some of whom are fine musicians who make their livings with this sort of thing — my ability to discern was blocked by masking. What exactly happened in the bass, and who is playing exactly which notes, lends itself to snap judgments, but on closer inspection seems to evade a definitive answer. I think that's what makes it such a puzzle to some folks who like the challenge of an answer that first leads you astray, then hides.

Fast Fourier Transform has been a staple of audio plugins and meters for a long, long time. It shows you a harmonic structure that we can assume to be correct, but it's impossible to say that it actually IS correct without carefully metering every device that is playing, then doing a lot of complex math. The important thing is that it produces results close enough for us to work with and come up with "right" answers, even if they ARE for the wrong reasons. Maybe not satisfying to a physicist, but good enough for a musician.

Shooshie