I can easily hear the difference between the two but would be hard pressed to choose one over the other. On the one hand, the 45 version was played on the radio constantly from release until the rise of CDs. On the other hand, I really like the darker versions of most of the Doors’ material. On the gripping hand, The Doors was the first LP I ever bought with my own money. I still own it. paper-thin and scratched to shit, but it’s still there in the collection.
The mix is very different on the Youtube version vs. my personal copy.
I think I like the slow version better, but much of that has to do with the depth of the mix - the Youtube version sounds very thin.
Yeah, I guess you’re right. Here’s the single mix of the song, and it is faster than the album version and seems to be in the right key (around 132bpm and in A minor). I never noticed that before. Listening to the original album version and playing along with it, it seems like it’s not quite in Ab minor, but close to it.
Probably any musician types figured this out already. I prefer the corrected version, the album version always sounded draggy, now I know why. It definitely has a brighter, hippy vibe going on, a little more danceable maybe.
Buggering tape speeds was the bane of guitarists trying to play along, sometimes (often, even) the group were not at 440 A either. Add to that altered tunings and it can be difficult to figure out what the hell they were doing.
The Doors were always a little bit out there, a little more menacing than the average, groovy, hippy band.
For about fifteen years I remastered 78 RPM records as a hobby. Speeds weren’t well-regulated when those records were made, so one thing I did was figure out the proper playback speed for each record. I learned some telltale signs of a recording played back at the wrong speed. Vocals sound wrong when they’re too slow: vowels and sibilants drag on too long, and consonants lose their edge.
The leading “C” (the consonant, not the note) in the first “Come on baby, light my fire” sounds natural in the speed-corrected version, and slurred in the slow version. The “S” in “try to set the night on fire” sounds natural in the faster version, and too drawn out in the slower version.
So, in my opinion, Morrison’s voice in the speed-corrected version sounds like a real human voice, while his voice in the original slow version sounds a bit “off.” That’s not surprising - 3.5% is quite a difference in speed - the difference in pitch is more than half a semitone. A full semitone is about a 6% difference.
Since the recording was originally released 3.5% slow, it wasn’t actually in tune for the key of A♭. Anyone who had good absolute pitch (which I don’t) should have noticed it, as should anyone who tried to play along with the record. It’s a little surprising that it too this long for someone to correct the problem.
While listening to the speed corrected version I kept thinking to myself that I probably liked the slower version better. Then after listening to the slower version there’s absolutely no question. I not only like the slower version better, but a hell of a lot better. The corrected version sounds rushed to me, Morrison’s voice sounds higher and poppy rather than dark and Morrison-like, and the instruments sound thin and hurried. One thing I noticed right of the bat was that the mix is different and I don’t care for it either. I agree with those who say slowing it down was the right call.
I think it was more of a happy mistake. Kinda like Strawberry Fields, where, to sync up the keys of two different versions, the initial minute is slowed down a bit, which adds some psychedelic wooziness to the feel, but was a George Martin Can Fix It practicality.
The interesting thing to me is how many people are now noticing it, and having strong preferences one way or another, when apparently the single version that’s been playing on the radio all along has been “fast,” while the album version is the slow one. Surely, more people are more familiar with the faster single version from the radio, no? It’s not like this remaster is the first time the song’s been in the right key–it’s just a speeding up of the album track. The single has been in the right key and tempo all along.
I always have been aware of the truncated version with the middle organ solo severely edited as a single. I guess I assumed one was the long album version and one was the single and any other sonic differences I perceived I wrote off to that.
I don’t wish in any way to claim I heard the speed difference, but heard little things and wrote it off to the singles version, if that makes sense. This thread crystallized that a bit further.
The faster version is what I remember hearing on the radio and on the record players of neighbors when I was a toddler. I hadn’t heard it that way in such a long time! Kids danced to this in '68 at pool parties and I know because I was there.
(I’m the age of some of those ‘dancing toddlers’ you’d see if you watched the movie ‘Woodstock’.)
In the 70s, when people started playing the slowed down version, I started to think, “Wow, did the DOORS Really suck that badly? This is so slow… is this what they meant when they said this was ‘drug music’? What was I thinking liking this song as a little kid?”
It may be a slight hijack, but back when I had a decent turn table, there was wheel on the side with which you could adjust the speed of the songs quite a bit by very small increments above or below the 33 1/3 play speed.
I remember playing some songs on the “Rio” by Duran Duran album and liking them much better at slightly higher play speeds. It didn’t work for about half to three quarters of the songs on different albums that I tried it on…
but on some songs the song had, for me, a much better sound.
My roommate at the time said that I had spoiled my ears on ‘cheap sped up music’ that radio stations played to try to jam in more commercials per hour and that the slower versions were "the real music’ and that I should learn to appreciate it.
Thank you for showing me, years later, that this was just another thing he was full of shit about. 
I agree with Starving Artist. The faster recording sounds reminiscent of the teenage garage band* whose inexperienced drummer rushes everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if they would have preferred to record it again at a slower tempo, but were short on time or budget.
*I was at a battle of the bands event years ago where a band made up of high school aged kids rushed through their songs so fast that they still had nearly half their allotted time left. After the mostly polite applause died down the singer said “Uh, that’s all we brought. We thought it would take longer.”
Thanks, Wordman. I didn’t know that about Strawberry Fields. I’ll go give it a listen.
It’s only a 4 bpm difference. Over the course of a 7 minute song, it would only be 13 seconds faster. I mean, yes, it feels a little faster, but it doesn’t sound anything like rushed to me. It’s a much subtler difference than the type of speed-ups you get from a band pumped on adrenaline. I do agree that the feel of the groove is slightly different. After listening to it a few more times, I think I prefer the slightly faster version in A. I couldn’t exactly tell you why, but it might be because I’m more familiar with it at that pitch and tempo, not having ever owned a Doors album but only hearing their stuff off the radio.
But that’s all it takes to hear the change in pitch. When I hear the change in pitch, I immediately think the speed has changed. Obviously, faster = higher.
Before listening to speedier version, I was actually expecting to struggle to hear a difference. I went in skeptical, because it didn’t seem like a lot. Very easy to be convinced otherwise upon listening.
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Speaking of The Doors remaster, I could never get used to the new version of “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” with Jim Morrison actually saying, “She gets high!” Yes, I know that’s only restoring the original vocal which was censored, and much of it’s simply being so used to the truncated version. But I think his repeated “She get…she get…” works better as a scat vocal, like Jim’s so excited that he can’t get the words out, giving the listener a sense of tension as you think, “She gets…what? What does she get?” Simply shouting “She gets high!” over and over sounds rather cliche and dumb. At least, that’s my humble opinion.
As for “Light My Fire”, I was always puzzled by the sped-up tempo & key change whenever they played the song live. Now it makes more sense. But I still much prefer the original, slower album version.
So then, what does it mean if someone (me) can’t detect a difference. I also have given up recognizing what someone means when they say auto tune sounds horrible. I listen with/without auto tune and both sound either the same or similarly good.
Thing is, I love music (but can’t sing or play an instrument). 
I like how the Wikipedia article says that the speed discrepancy “was brought to Bruce Botnick’s attention by Brigham Young University professor Michael Hicks”. Surely, as the song’s audio engineer, Botnick would have been aware that the recording had been slowed down on the LP and that it had been done, presumably, as a deliberate decision by the producer Paul A. Rothchild? I feel it’s unlikely that it was done in error, although not impossible I suppose. Unless he “brought it to his attention” in an “if you can remember the Sixties you weren’t really there” kind of way.
Playing around with the tape speed for deliberate effect was quite common in the late Sixties. Often it was done for individual tracks in the songs rather than the finished song itself. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia describing the recording of The Beatles’ song “Rain”:
Perhaps a more analogous example from The Beatles’ catalogue is the song “Across the Universe”, which has, over the years, been released four times and at three different speeds. All versions, I think, use the same recording - of an acoustic guitar and Lennon vocal - as a foundation, although they have different instrumentations and accompaniments overdubbed on to each of them.
Although recorded in early 1968 in the key of D major, the song didn’t see its first release until it was included on a World Wildlife Fund charity compilation album in late 1969, speeded up by almost a semitone and with overdubbed backing vocals and animal sound effects. It was released again on The Beatles’ Let It Be album in 1970, this time slowed down by almost a semitone and with a Phil Spector orchestral arrangement. 1996’s Anthology saw a third released version, at the original speed and with Indian instrument accompaniment and 2003’s Let It Be… Naked saw a fourth version, at the correct speed again, but without accompanying instrumentation and with digital tuning fixes.
So the difference in speed between the 1969 and 1970 release versions of “Across the Universe” - neither of which is at the original speed - is almost double that of the difference between the two versions of “Light My Fire”.
With the old analogue technology, pitch and tempo were inextricably linked and so changing the tape speed would change both. With digital technology, your recording can be tempo-adjusted without altering pitch/key.
The turntables used by modern DJs have a pitch control slider that adjusts pitch (and therefore tempo), typically up to 8% higher or lower. By adjusting the sliders on two adjacent turntables, they can synchronize the tempos and align the beats of two different records in order to blend them together and segue between songs without pause.
To me, it’s the pitch that’s more obvious than the tempo, as mentioned above. However, were it presented to me without context (not side-by-side) I doubt I would notice. But I’m not a huge Doors fan and I mostly know the song from the radio which, as noted, is the “sped-up” (actually normal speed) version, assuming the single. Plus, as a keyboardist, I’m used to playing it in A minor, anyway.
Well, the master is on 1" audio tape. So if I adjust it while dumping the tape for mixing, it’s going to shift. I wouldn’t adjust the speed digitally, because every time I’ve done that it introduces artifacts from the transform that sound worse to me than pitch shifting.
You know, I wouldn’t sweat it. Music evangelist that I am, it would be fun to talk stuff like that through in person, but that’s a geeky thing.