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http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform (http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform)

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform (http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform)

Interesting story.  Kind of hard to believe though - with all the ear training some musicians do, you'd thing that interval would be easy enough to pick out.  And with all the people who surely must have played that song on piano, someone must have noticed it's a standard piano chord.  Unless it's some weird exotic thing.

I think the difficulty was in picking the piano out of the notes played on the 12-string, 6-string accoustic and bass. George is usually given credit for the chord, and it was mostly his 12-string. But in reality, John, Paul and George were all playing notes on that recording, with the producer throwing in a simple piano chord. Ringo might have even been doing something.

With the piano not officially part of the instrumentation, a lot of people weren't even looking for it. The difference it made must have been so subtle that only a trained musician would recognize that something didn't quite add up, and only a computer could separate the tones sufficiently to provide a definitive answer.