The resulting chord was completely different than anything found in the literature about the song to date, which is one reason why 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. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”ĭr. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments.

“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. It worked, up until a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song.

The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record. Brown decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle. It’s quite remarkable.”įour years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Dr. It sounds outlandish that someone could create a mystery around a chord from a time where artists used such simple recording techniques. “I had tried to play the first chord of the song many takes over the years. “I started playing guitar because I heard a Beatles record-that was it for my piano lessons,” says Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics with a good laugh. 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. The opening chord to A Hard Day’s Night is also famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing.

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