Strange Days (The Song)

I really like the sound on Strange Days (the song). It's one of the first uses of a Moog synsthesizer in Rock, I think it sounds pretty cool.

Its a neat effect for the voice yea.. but its a bit hard for someone who isnt so familiar with them to understand half the lyrics.. and ... again im not certain this is the cause but SOMETHING is causing the track to sound like theres several bad edits on the drum track.

Yea I love it now that Im familiar with the words. I wouldnt change a thing.

Whereas the artists, producers and engineers at a facility like the EMI Studios on Abbey Road in London benefitted from in-house technical staff who created devices to satisfy their unconventional sonic demands, this was not the case at Sunset Sound. "The big studios like United and Radio Recorders and RCA and Columbia had their techs," Botnick remembers, "whereas at all of the independent places like Sunset and Harmony and Gold Star we did our own stuff. The way the console was set up at Sunset, there was a patch point everywhere. The patchbay was immediately to my right on the floor and it went up to the top of the desk, so you had to patch everything. There was nothing ever normalled in the console. I could therefore make a microphone appear on whatever pot I wanted it to and, in the days before Fuzztones, if I needed to effect a guitar on a track like 'When The Music's Over' I could come right out of the fader into another line amp and then turn up the output. That line amp would, of course, feed another fader, so you really wouldn't hear the first fader because it didn't finish the circuit — the signal would go from microphone to mic preamp and from the mic preamp to the fader. Then I would go out of that fader into another mic pre, and the more I'd turn it up, the more distortion there would be in the next mic pre. And then that's when the tubes would blow. If I had done that working for a major facility, I'd have probably been kicked out on my ass! Still, in my estimate, that guitar sound on 'When The Music's Over' is one of the cleanest and most beautiful that I've ever recorded, not to mention how well Robbie performed."
Meanwhile, it was thanks to Paul Beaver that the Doors were introduced to the synthesizer. A year earlier, in 1966, Beaver and his partner Bernie Krause had purchased one of Robert Moog's first units, and after some fruitless attempts to popularise it around Hollywood, they displayed it in a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival and subsequently attracted interest from some among the rock cognoscenti. Paul Beaver himself quickly became one of LA's most in-demand session musicians, yet in the case of Strange Days it was only his Moog that made its way into Sunset Sound Recorders for use on the title track.
"We created an envelope where we could feed Jim's track into the Moog so that he could play any note on the keyboard and it would process his voice," Botnick explains. "I then added a little delay and fed the whole thing into an infinite tape repeat. That was hand-played."


The year 1967 marked a high point on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of songwriting creativity and technological innovation, and in the latter regard Bruce Botnick was constantly coming up with new techniques to attain credible new sounds. For instance, at the same time that he was recording the Doors' Strange Days album, he was also engineering Van Dyke Parks's Song Cycle LP, and it was the desire to achieve a fluttering effect on the vocal which gave rise to a Botnick invention that Parks dubbed the farkle: three-quarter-inch masking tape was creased in eighth-inch folds and wrapped like a fan around the capstan of an Ampex 300 full-track mono tape machine at 30ips. The tape then ran through the recorder and fluttered as the rubber capstan bounced, and, by bringing back the output of the farkle to the mix, Botnick was able to attain the sought-after effect while adding plenty of echo from the famed Sunset Sound chamber and delaying it further via an Ampex 200 three-track at 15ips. This same spirit of innovation prevailed on the Strange Days project.
"One my big things was messing with echo," Botnick recalls. "That Ampex 200 would hold 14-inch reels, and it had been converted to three-track from a quarter-inch mono. Allan Emig had actually got an Ampex head stack and attached it to this machine, and made his own record/playback amplifiers. Those amplifiers were totally separate, they weren't even on the same chassis, and they had different equalisations available. They had NAB, they had the European CCIR, and they had AME, which was Ampex Master Equalization. That was basically a pre-emphasis type of noise-reduction system, where it put in more highs on record and less highs on playback to ostensibly cut down the tape hiss. It was really ahead of its time, a precursor to Dolby in some respects, but I'd use it on that machine as the delay for the echo, because I loved that 167-millisecond delay in the Ampex at 15ips. I would make the record side AME but the playback NAB, so I got this bump in the curve and it really made the echo chamber shine. I always delayed the output in the chamber, not the input, because it sounds different.
"Then I had a really nice EMT plate that I used for Jim's vocals, because we recorded our echo live on him. How many singers would do that today? None. Nobody has the courage to make that kind of commitment. Back then, however, everybody did it — I don't know of a studio that didn't record the echo live. In those days people didn't think as much about these things that get in the way of performing."

Classic tracks Strange Days
From Sound On Sound 2003