On this day · 62 years ago · 1964
62 Years Ago Today: A Hard Day's Night Premieres, and George Harrison's 12-String Makes History
The Beatles' first movie premiered in London to 12,000 fans and a closed-off Piccadilly Circus. Its opening chord, half George Harrison's brand-new Rickenbacker 12-string, half studio piano, stayed unsolved for four decades.
By Twelve, 12-string guitar desk · Edited by Cadence ·
A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles' first feature film, premiered at the London Pavilion on July 6, 1964, with Princess Margaret in attendance and 12,000 fans crowding Piccadilly Circus. The title track's opening chord, played on George Harrison's Rickenbacker 360/12 twelve-string alongside John Lennon's six-string, Paul McCartney's bass, and George Martin's piano, went unidentified for 40 years until a mathematician used a Fourier transform to isolate every note in 2004.
A movie premiere that shut down Piccadilly Circus
Monday, July 6, 1964, 8:30 p.m., the London Pavilion. The Beatles' first feature film, A Hard Day's Night, had its Royal Premiere in front of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon, and outside, Piccadilly Circus had to be closed to traffic. Roughly 12,000 fans packed in for a chance to see the band arrive, per the Beatles Bible's account of the premiere. It was five months after the band's first American television appearance, and Beatlemania was already a fully formed phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic.
The film itself, a mockumentary-style comedy following a chaotic day in the band's touring life, would go on to be a genuine critical success as well as a commercial one, and its soundtrack gave the world one of the most instantly recognizable openings in recorded music.
One chord, four decades of guesswork
The title track opens cold with a single ringing chord, and for 40 years, guitarists covering the song simply couldn't agree on what it was. Standard voicings got close but never quite matched the recording. Part of the reason: a chunk of that chord's harmonic weight comes from George Harrison's brand-new Rickenbacker 360/12, an electric 12-string he'd only recently taken delivery of, layered with John Lennon's six-string, Paul McCartney's bass note, and producer George Martin doubling extra notes on piano. Four different instruments, stacked into one chord, is not something a guitarist untangles by ear alone.
How a mathematician finally solved it
The mystery held until 2004, when Dalhousie University mathematician Jason Brown applied a Fourier transform, a signal-processing tool that breaks a complex sound into its individual frequencies, to an isolated recording of the chord. Per Dalhousie's own account of Brown's research and the Beatles Bible's breakdown of the finding, Brown identified George Harrison playing an F add9-type voicing on the 12-string (notes across the A, D, G, and C register, doubled by the instrument's octave courses), John Lennon adding a note on six-string, Paul McCartney holding down a D on bass, and George Martin filling in extra notes on piano that no guitar part could account for.
The takeaway for anyone who has ever tried to nail this chord on a single guitar: you can't, not exactly, because it was never just a guitar chord to begin with.
The 12-string's lasting mark
All four of the instruments stacked into that chord, guitars and bass alike, sat in ordinary standard tuning, which makes the density of the voicing even more of a studio trick than an alternate-tuning shortcut. Harrison's Rickenbacker on this one song directly created one of the 1960s' other defining folk-rock guitar sounds. The Byrds' Roger McGuinn has said that seeing Harrison play the instrument in this film sent him and his bandmates on what he called "a reconnaissance run to a movie theater that was showing A Hard Day's Night" specifically to study the guitar, as McGuinn told Guitar Player. He traded in his acoustic 12-string for a Rickenbacker 360/12 not long after, and it became the signature instrument behind the Byrds' Mr. Tambourine Man and the jangly folk-rock sound that followed.
If a 12-string is on your own list, the string gauges matter more than they do on a six-string, since you're managing nearly double the tension across the neck. Our 12-string strings guide breaks down exactly what to put on an acoustic or an electric 12-string and why the gauges run lighter than you'd expect.
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