På sin hjemmeside fortæller Paul McCartney om, hvordan han og George Harrison lærte nye akkorder:

It was a combination of three ways, really. Some were from people showing them to us; for example, Jim Gretty who was a guy from a guitar shop in Liverpool called Hessy’s. He had a guitar and was a jazz player, and I remember him showing us a chord that was F, but it had a couple of notes added. We called it F demented!”

Paul then picked up the acoustic guitar that lives in his office and began playing the F demented chord. You have to really stretch your fingers to make the chord, but Paul did it
with ease.

 

“The chord found its way into a lot of things, like ‘Michelle.’  Another chord came in via ‘Along Came Jones’ by The Coasters.”

 

Paul again illustrated his point by playing ‘Michelle’ followed by ‘Along Came Jones’ by The Coasters. (Check out The Coasters’ song when you get chance, it’s a great tune!)

 

“Sometimes we would pick them up from sheet music, like, ‘Oh! We don’t know that chord’. But mainly it was just figuring it out from listening to songs we liked. We knew that
something went up in the chords, so me and George would work it out. Buddy Holly would use an odd chord like that – ‘Raining In My Heart’ – and the second chord in there was
augmented. We worked a lot of that out by ear. There’d also be songs like ‘Til There Was You’ that would have these chords in too.”

 

Paul then told us whilst laughing, “Sometimes we’d be working with people who knew notation and stuff and they would say, ‘Is that C diminished? Is that the chord?’ And we’d
look at each other, shrug and go, ‘Yes!'”

 

Then, almost as an encore to our question, Paul played us ‘Raining In My Heart’ by Buddy Holly.