Ray Manzarek, who has died of bile duct cancer aged 74, created the signature keyboard sounds on the Doors' classic tracks LA Woman, Riders on the Storm and, perhaps most memorably, Light My Fire. One of the band's trademarks was that they had no permanent bass player, since Manzarek supplied the bass lines from the keyboard with his left hand. The group's unusual jazz-inflected sound, coupled with their lead singer Jim Morrison's lurid lyrics and showmanship, was developed in the mid-1960s at the London Fog nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and then at the nearby Whisky a Go Go, where they became the house band.

The Doors explored mysterious and sinister pastures on songs such as When the Music's Over, People Are Strange and The End. "We were all about peace and love like everybody else," Manzarek commented, "but those were some dark times with Vietnam and the civil rights struggle and political upheaval in the country. There was no way that couldn't soak into what we were doing and inform our music."

He was born Raymond Daniel Manczarek into a family of Polish ancestry on Chicago's South Side. His parents, Helena and Raymond, encouraged his musical leanings and paid for private piano lessons; he also yearned to be a basketball player. He graduated in economics from DePaul University in Chicago and then moved to Los Angeles to study cinematography at UCLA. There, he met Morrison, a fellow film student, and the story goes that during a chance meeting on Venice Beach, Morrison recited his lyrics to what would become the song Moonlight Drive. Manzarek cited this as the lightbulb moment from which the Doors sprang.

The group formed in 1965, the lineup completed with the guitarist Robby Krieger and the drummer John Densmore, whom Manzarek had met at a transcendental meditation lecture. The quartet took their name from Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception; the notion that they were exploring different levels of consciousness often emerged in interviews with the band.

They originally signed to Columbia Records but the label seemed unsure of how to promote them, and after being released from their contract, the Doors signed to Jac Holzman's Elektra. Their eponymous debut album, released in 1967, soared to No 2 and provided what would be their biggest single, Light My Fire, which reached No 1. A stronger second album, Strange Days, followed later that year but its sales were hampered slightly by the absence of another top 10 single.

After the No 1 album Waiting for the Sun (1968), they suffered something of a backlash with The Soft Parade (1969), which featured brass and string arrangements, but scored a hit single with Touch Me nevertheless. The follow-up, Morrison Hotel (1970), had a rootsier, bluesier feel and restored the critics' faith, while LA Woman (1971) took that process further still, featuring two of the most enduring pieces in their catalogue with the title track and Riders on the Storm.

By then Morrison, battling alcoholism and emotional problems, had become something of a pariah following several notorious onstage incidents. He moved to Paris, where he was found dead in a bathtub in 1971, aged 27.

The remaining members of the Doors released the post-Morrison albums Other Voices (1971) and Full Circle (1972), then reunited in 1978 to make An American Prayer, on which they created new backing tracks to accompany recordings of Morrison reading his own poetry.

Manzarek began a solo career and in the late 70s performed with the band Nite City, which included the former Blondie bass player Nigel Harrison. He lent his production skills to the seminal punk album Los Angeles (1980) by the band X; teamed up with the composer Philip Glass in 1983 to record a rock version of Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana; and in 1987 collaborated with Echo and the Bunnymen. In 1998 he published a memoir, Light My Fire: My Life With the Doors, though his novel about a Morrison-esque rock star faking his own death, The Poet in Exile, was less favourably greeted. He also played live shows with the Beat poet Michael McClure.

Manzarek released a double CD "oral history", The Doors: Myth and Reality, in 1997 and five years later toured with Krieger as The Doors of the 21st Century, which provoked a lawsuit from Densmore and the Morrison estate to prevent them using the Doors name. Manzarek himself had been outraged by Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors. "[We] were about idealism and the 60s quest for freedom and brotherhood," he said. "But the film … is based on madness and chaos. Oliver has made Jim into an agent of destruction."

Manzarek lived in California's Napa Valley, where he grew vegetables fruit trees and raised chickens. In 2011 he released his last album, Translucent Blues, a collaboration with the slide guitarist Roy Rogers. He freely admitted that the Doors legacy had left him comfortably set up for life. "I haven't had to get a day job," he said. "The royalties just keep rolling in." Earlier this month a new iPad app for the Doors went on sale, masterminded by Holzman.

In 1967 Manzarek married Dorothy Fujikawa. She survives him, along with his son, Pablo, three grandchildren and his brothers, Rick and James.

• Ray Manzarek (Raymond Daniel Manczarek), musician, born 12 February 1939; died 20 May 2013