Guitar Chord

Todays guitar chord of the day is the famous first guitar chord from The Beatles A Hard Days Night from the film and album of the same name.

Heres is the actual guitar chord played by George Harrison for the A Hard Days Night intro:

Underneath this guitar chord, Paul McCartney played a D note on the bass, there was also a further piano chord in the mix. This is the reason that the naming of George Harrisons chord has been subject to some debate over the years. As weve mentioned in previous Guitar Chord a Day posts, there are many guitar chords that are synonyms - chords that have the same notes that can be named differently depending on their function.

If we assume that this chord is functioning as a G, we would name it G11 or G11/D taking into account the bass note. Weve looked at other 11th guitar inversions here.

The notes of G11 are: G, (B), D, F, A, C - though the 3rd (B) is almost always omitted.

If we assume the chord is functioning as a D we could name the chord Dm11.
The notes of Dm11 are: D, F, A, C, E G

As you can see the notes of Dm11 and G11 are very similar and this has led to some of the confusion of the chord name.

Although the above inversion is the chord that George Harrison actually played for the opening of A Hard Days Night, if youre playing this song without a bass player to play the D, it might work best if you play this inversion. Here weve included the open D string instead of the F on the 3rd fret.

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