What is the opening chord in The Beatles song ‘A Hard Day’s Night’?
It’s one of the most instantly recognisable song introductions of all time. One second, there is absolute silence, and then, a gigantic crash before John Lennon begins barking out the opening verse to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. For scores of fans who sat in theatres to see The Beatles on the big screen or just anyone who bought the accompanying album of the same name, there was no better way to get thrust into the excitement of The Beatles’ world than on the intro for ‘A Hard Day’s Night’.
“We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning,” George Martin told Mark Lewisohn for his book, The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. “The strident guitar chord was the perfect launch.”
While just about any music fan can immediately place the song’s opening chord, the actual makeup of the chord has baffled musicologists, Beatles fanatics, and even band members themselves. Even though it’s been available to dissect for more than 50 years, the exact composition of the opening chord to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ is still being debated to this day. Nearly every moment of The Beatles’ career has been documented, but the introduction to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ contains one of the most potent and never-ending Beatles mysteries that are still out there.
Figuring out the actual chord involves trying to detangle a web of instruments and old-school recording techniques. When asked in an online Q+A session in 2001 what he played for the chord, George Harrison both helped demystify a part of the puzzle and continued the mystery surrounding the full composition of the chord. “It is F with a G on top (on the 12-string), but you’ll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story,” Harrison wrote.
Herein lies one of the biggest problems with figuring out the opening chord: there are lots of different instruments to account for. For the most part, each instrument is playing something different, adding a lot of disparate tones into the mix without a clear distillation between one or the other. It’s not as simple as going through the individual recorded tracks either: A Hard Day’s Night was recorded with a four-track tape recorder. This means that most of the instruments in the mix were likely combined onto one track while recording the song (the practice of “bouncing” allowed artists to add more overdubs during a time when the technology was limited).
Some instruments that can clearly be heard in the mix include Harrison’s newly-acquired 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. George Martin can be heard hitting a chord on the piano, McCartney’s bass plays a note in there somewhere, and Ringo Starr lifts the whole thing with a snare drum-cymbal hit combo. It seems likely that John Lennon also played one of the chords, likely strumming out something on his Gibson jumbo acoustic guitar that he plays on the rest of the song.
So what does everyone play? That’s the part that remains up for debate. For solo guitar players, a G7sus4 often produces results that sound as close to the opening chord as possible. That doesn’t mean that the G7sus4 was actually played on the record, but rather that the chord best replicates the mixture of tones that created the original chord. Harrison claimed he played a Fadd9, and it seems likely that McCartney hit a D somewhere on his Hofner bass. Since Martin’s piano and the other guitars played by Harrison and/or Lennon share a lot of sonic space, it’s harder to parse through those hits to find exactly what they played.
The debate around the chord has inspired numerous analyses, debates, and even mathematical papers that attempt to detangle the chord through Fourier transforms. Harrison is the only one to have commented on the chord’s composition, and it doesn’t seem as though any of the other musicians have been asked to replicate what they played. In surviving live footage, Lennon appears to play the same Fadd9 chord that Harrison described. However, other footage (like from the band’s 1964 concert at The Hollywood Bowl) shows Harrison playing a chord resembling a G chord for the opening hit.
Live footage from the time of the song’s release is grainy and hard to decipher, and modern footage of McCartney playing the track keeps the mystery alive. During his performance at New York’s Grand Central Station in 2018, McCartney pretty unmistakably played a D on his bass. It seems like Martin’s piano hits provide the missing pieces to the chord’s actual composition.
Check out The Beatles playing ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ live and see if you can figure out what the chord is.
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