Recording live in the studio with John Densmore and The Doors

This guy keeps coming up in things I write and in my thinking about production. He's probably a bigger influence on me than I give him credit for.

I wasn't really a Doors fan. In high school there was a brief phase where a Jim Morrison bio came out and everything was The Doors, The Doors, The Doors, but really, we were 10th graders just hoping to hear the long version of 'Light My Fire' on the radio. Nowadays I prefer to hear the short version on the radio. But 'The End' was cool, the whole 'Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Cafe' album was good, and 'LA Woman' was a great song to drive to - still is.

The whole album is great, and a perfect listen for a grey Sunday.

One thing I always thought was great on Doors records was the drumming and the drum sounds. In terms of recordings in the mid 1960's, which band had better, and by that I mean more modern, drum sounds than The Doors? Maybe some of the Beatles stuff? Certainly not Cream - they totally lost Ginger Baker in those recordings. The Who? Nope. The Stones? Nope.

The Doors records always had a great, natural snare sound, beautifully recording cymbals with tons of articulation, and HUGE tom sounds. I still think The Doors drum sounds stack up against just about anything, and given the time, they're remarkable.

Bruce Botnick Rules!

The Doors records were all engineered by a guy named Bruce Botnick, and it's a pity his name isn't tossed around in audio circles with the same reverence as Al Schmitt's or Bruce Swedien's. His discography is amazing, stretching way beyond The Doors, out into film mixing, and a bunch of hit records for Eddie Money. He did a fantastic record for the band Love when he was 22 years old — he was a wunderkind. Look him up. He's a monster.

The Doors basically cut their albums live in Sunset Studios, initially to four track and then eight track. Their last album, 'LA Woman', was recorded in their basement rehearsal space, rather than a studio, at Bruce Botnick's suggestion. He set up a control room in their business office and ran mic cables and a talkback system down the stairs. 'LA Woman' sounds great. Hard to believe anyone could get such a clear, powerful recording out of a basement, maybe 8 mics and two or three compressors.

Botnick's recording set-up for Densmore's drums was usually mono, using very few microphones. He would put a condenser roughly at Densmore's head level but over the kit, and another one under the snare, flipping the phase of that—he would have had to adjust these two mics a lot to minimize phase shifts. Single dynamic mic on the kick. This is about the same as Glyn Johns' drum setup at about the same time. There are pictures of Densmore in the studio, with an additional mic or two on the kit, but really, it's just three mics in roughly the configuration described.

Densmore took off the bottom heads and NEVER changed skins (heads). I mean NEVER.

Of course, most of the sound of the drums on a Doors recording is the way Densmore played. He was really a jazzer at heart, and you can hear this in his amazing cymbal work and in the economy of his fills. He's also very interesting and inventive as a player. Bear in mind, most of these recordings were banged out, everyone playing at once, a vocal cut live as well, the whole band listening to each other and basically arranging things on the spot. They were a much better bunch of players than they get credit for, and Jim Morrison a much more capable singer than what is suggested by his reputation.

LA Woman

So, 'LA Woman': The Doors are cutting basically a live blues album in a basement with two extra players, guitarist Marc Benno and bassist Jerry Scheff. They did 10 sessions across about seven days (unbelievable pace - these days just the damn drums take a month), cutting songs in five or six takes. Who records like this these days???

There's a lot of things to hear in Densmore's playing.

He follows the singer. Listen to his fills and you'll notice he's always working around the singer. Actually, scratch that: he's always following whatever instrument is leading the track at that moment. If it's vocals, he's doing something around the vocals; if it's a guitar run or a keyboard flourish, he works off of that. There's a wonderful sense of "handing off" in The Doors' musical arrangement.

Think of "The Gate"

I think of the different sections of a song as being separated by a fence with a gate. So, there's a verse butted up against a chorus, and separating the two is this narrow gate. How the band proceeds through that gate is a huge part of arranging. Sometimes all the instruments walk through the gate together (all playing the same thing) and sometimes one instrument goes through—a guitar lick—and then the rest follow. And with shitty bands, everyone just sort of slams through the gate in a big fucking catastrophe.

Bands that arrange well and listen to each other well, like The Doors, sort of line-up and go through the gate one after the other, no one stepping on someone else's feet, nothing clumsy, everything clean and interesting. And you hear this all over 'LA Woman', where one idea follows another, follows another, and you can literally hear the "handing off" of the attention, the position, as they move through the gate.

Wacky sort of explanation, but listen for it, and of course, try to apply it to your own work.

Finally, Densmore plays with a sense of where he is in the song and where the song is heading to. 'LA Woman', one of the greatest driving songs ever recorded, is a good example of this. Densmore's playing is slightly different at any point in the record. Not only can you listen to just the drums and know, "Ok, this is a verse," you can listen and hear that it's the second verse. There's something slightly different about the playing. It's hard to describe but easy to hear, I think. Densmore also, somehow, plays in such a way that you know the song is in its final stages, that it's ending. Somehow the rhythm is triumphant, or slightly looser. The ending of 'LA Woman' has always sounded triumphant to me. There's a musical narrative to that song. It starts tight and almost "careful," falls apart into drunkenness in the breakdown, the bridge, then somehow finds its way out of that mess and into the sun and new hope, as the band goes speeding off into the sunset down Sunset Boulevard, and out onto the highway. It simply feels great.

Ok. Enough of me. Have a listen to 'LA Woman' while driving. Don't blame me for the speeding ticket.

I think things will get a bit more concrete in the next few weeks. I'll give you some ideas that are more ready to use and are less artsie fartsie. As always, I appreciate all your comments. They make me think, and thinking is good.