The “lost” chord that The Beatles travelled around Liverpool trying to learn: “The missing part”

None of The Beatles ever claimed to be the best musicians in the world when they first got together. Half of the time, their music was being played for a laugh more than anything else, and getting the right chord to a song could have simply been a case of John Lennon and Paul McCartney having a bit of fun when they were sitting next to the piano. Then again, getting that much musical knowledge didn’t come without some hard work on their part trying to find the right tune.

At the same time, it’s not like they didn’t have some kind of musical intuition when making their tunes. Every member of the group said time and time again that they didn’t know how to read sheet music, but if they relied on their ear half the time, most of the unconventional pieces of their songs would fall into place, whether it was the strange time signatures or the odd sour harmony that made everything blend.

But if none of the band knew the right chords to the song, there was no way they would get anywhere. Lennon may have spent the first few years of his life playing banjo chords that he learned from his mother, but after Macca started showing him the ropes with traditional guitar chords, it wasn’t long before they started exploring new avenues.

There was always room for them to play rock and roll, but the blues was always a fine place for any musician to start. The whole form is already based around three chords throughout an entire song, so getting the song down wouldn’t be a problem. That said, McCartney remembered having to search far and wide before finally landing on that secret ingredient that perfectly tied most of their blues numbers up.

While the relative E major and A major chords are great for rock and roll, McCartney remembered travelling around Liverpool to find someone who knew the chord B7, saying, “Sometimes we’d travel the whole of Liverpool just to go to someone who knew a chord we didn’t know. I remember once hearing about a bloke who knew B7. That was the missing part, the link, the lost chord. We changed a couple of buses, found this fella. We learned it off him, got back on the bus, went home to our mates and went ‘ZHING.’”

And when someone’s starting on guitar, B7 tends to be a large hump to get over. While it’s not the nightmare-inducing idea of playing barre chords up and down the neck of the guitar, it can be a bit of a finger twister when half of the notes have to be played on one fret, which can be more than a little bit cumbersome if you’re not as coordinated with the guitar neck.

But if B7 were the most technical chord The Beatles ever reached, we wouldn’t be talking about them in such hallowed terms today. They had the power to make strange chords that no one had heard, and when learning jazz chords off of a few guitarists in Liverpool, they brought something a lot more interesting to their early records by throwing in everything from diminished to augmented chords into the mix.

While some of them might not sound the best when played in isolation, The Beatles’ use of the chords is what made them one of the finest bands in England. Everyone would have gladly stuck within the framework of blues and pop, but the Fab Four weren’t afraid to put together chords that told the story just as well as the lyrics could.