Now this is annoying. Dalhousie University professor Jason Brown has made an extensive study about the opening chord of ‘A Hard Days Night’. The reason why is because this chord sounds so fat, no guitar player ever could copy it. For the one reader who has no clue what I am talking about, press play will ‘ya!
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In my humble opinion this starts with the proper guitar, the proper amplifier AND record that in a proper room, and be done with it, but it goes one step further. Because of a new version of Melodyne (a pro -audio plugin for mangling and surgically alter sounds) he could extract each note of that chord and listen to it. I am not going to bother you with the details, you can read all about that in this 4 page pdf, but I can pretty much sum up the study in a few lines.
The reason the chord is so fat was, according to producer George Martin, because they knew that single chord was the opening of the album AND the movie. They were just going for the biggest bang they could come up with.
What’s in this study is a piece of music-geekdom I don’t even want to touch with a ten foot pole.
George playes a 12 string guitar in his solo, so it is safe to assume he uses the same guitar for the opening chord. He uses these notes, but that leaves out these notes, which could be played by John’s guitar. ***insert schnauzer gagging here***
To me a good record is like a movie: I don’t want to know how it’s made, I want to enjoy the organ sound, recorded through a fan, a wah-wah pedal an routed through a Marshall stack to give it some extra oomph. It’s still sounds like an organ, but it will be ‘different’
Every beatle recording has been extensively documented numerous books about those have been released over the last 40 years. To me further studies in that is just a waste of money and time.
I don’t know how much money went into this study, but I just took the sample and reproduced it in 5 minutes…by taking the 21th century route: SAMPLING! I even played smoke on the water with it, because that was the stupidest thing I could think of commenting on this news. (on a sidenote: what I did was illegal, but that is a whole different discussion)
Thank you very much.
A hard days smoke
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