Music
Instrument by instrument, chord by chord, section by section.
29 tag types · 3691 values
Most of their songs run under three minutes, but there is no end to what sits inside them. This category follows the playing and the composing: which instruments are on a record and what each one is doing, whether the bass walks or drops out altogether, what the voices are up to behind the lead, which songs are built on a riff and which instrument takes the solo, and the long and winding road the sound travelled from Chuck Berry to Stockhausen. Then there is the build of the thing: a song that opens on its chorus instead of its verse, an outro that runs exceptionally long, a song with no chorus at all. It tracks every little thing they do, which is how you find that Lennon breaks the bar far more often than McCartney: sixteen of his songs are in an unusual or shifting meter, against five of McCartney's.
Which Beatle did what, and when did the music change?
Who carried that weight, musically speaking. The year their songs suddenly ran forty seconds longer, the record that brought in more new instruments than any other, the chord nobody reached for until 1968, and which songs do the picking while others do the shouting (not to say gently weeping). Whether you read music or simply know the records by heart, something here will send you back to one of them listening differently.
Good places to start: Sitar, Fingerpicking, Key change and Indian.
Instrumentation
Which instruments are on the record, the family each one belongs to, and what the guitars, the bass, the drums and the keyboards are actually doing with them.
Every instrument heard on a recording, from the four of them on guitars and drums to the players and instruments brought in for one song.
The family an instrument belongs to, for anybody who wants the strings or the keyboards as a whole rather than one at a time.
What the guitars are doing beyond holding the chords, which is where most of the band's sound comes from.
What the bass is doing underneath the song, which on these records is rarely just the root note of the chord.
How the kit is played rather than which kit it is, from the touch on a ballad to the fills that carry an arrangement.
What a piano, organ or electric keyboard is doing when it is more than the chords under everything else.
Sound & Style
The kind of record it is, the music behind it, what the voices do, which instrument takes the solo and how the melody moves.
The dominant genre or style
Musical artists and traditions that shaped the sound of a song
Distinctive vocal techniques
Type of instrumental solo featured
What the tune itself does, as a line rather than as a chord: where it leans, what it answers and what it borrows.
Tempo, Key & Meter
How fast it runs, the key it sits in and how the bar is counted, including the songs that change their mind about all three.
How fast or slow the song is, measured in beats per minute (BPM).
The tonal center of the song - the 'home' note and scale that defines its harmonic landscape.
The meter or time signature(s) used in the song
Form & Structure
The build of the song: its form, its sections, what each section does, how one is joined to the next and what comes back round.
The overall structural form of the song - how sections are arranged and repeated.
The parts a song is built from and how many of each, which is where its shape becomes countable.
A section doing something out of the ordinary, which is usually the moment a song stops sounding like anybody else's.
How the parts of a song relate to each other: what is built from what, what varies, and where the instrumental passages sit.
Repetition in a song, at line, word and section level. Consecutive means back-to-back; Recurring means it returns after a gap.
Chord transition between song sections (e.g. last chord of verse → first chord of chorus), expressed as scale degrees.
Harmony
The chords and what they do, the mode a song sits in, the kind of chord it reaches for, and the chords it opens and closes on.
Harmonic devices and techniques used in the song's chord language
The choices behind the harmony rather than the chords themselves: how rich it is, where it sits and how it is put together.
Musical mode - the scale pattern that defines the song's melodic character
Notable chord types and progressions in roman numeral notation
The chord the record starts on, written as its degree in the key, so a song opening on the minor sixth can be found beside the others that do.
The chord the record finishes on, written as its degree in the key. Most Beatles songs land on the tonic and the ones that do not are the interesting part.
Chord Detailadvanced
The same harmony written four ways, as scale degrees, chord degrees, shapes and literal chords, for anybody comparing one song's movement against another's.
Notable chords by their position in the scale (roman numeral notation)
Chord progressions expressed as scale degrees (roman numerals). Key-aware patterns showing harmonic function.
Chord patterns normalized by interval structure (transposed to start on C). Captures recurring movement patterns regardless of key or harmonic function.
Exact chord sequences reused across multiple songs, regardless of key context. Shows when the same specific chords appear in different harmonic contexts.