“Once during a session we placed speakers all over the studio – on the stairs, on the toilet – to create a certain sound,” Axel Praefcke recalls. He is a sound engineer at Lightning Recorders, an analogue recording studio in East Berlin. Anyone who is drawn to the inconspicuously located, old factory building in the Karlshorst district is looking for a very specific sound – the reverberant, rattling sound of the 1950s. Praefcke knows how best to reproduce this and helps bands to implement it on their recordings.
To do this, he imitates old recording techniques with original equipment from that time – and if necessary, he also distributes Neumann microphones and sound amplifiers throughout the building. “When we were recording back then, we were looking for something that nobody could explain later. That’s why we put microphones on all the instruments and, in an incredible move, put the loudspeakers everywhere.” The instruments were then recorded indirectly via the speakers. “It sounded funny, but also super great,” says Praefcke. But everyday life in the recording studio isn’t always that crazy. “Such campaigns are really fun, but only work if you really have the time.”
Record like 70 years ago
Praefeck is himself active in several rock’n’roll bands: he is the singer of the group Cherry Casino and The Gamblers and plays with the Round Up Boys. In 2003 he founded the studio with bandmate Ike Stoye. Initially they were supported by the record label Rhythm Bomb Records, for which they only produced recordings at the time. The men have been working independently since 2008. Stoye retired from production in 2021. “Ike is busy with the sessions where I work as a studio musician and therefore can’t sit in the director’s office,” explains Praefcke.
In the direction “all the technology comes together”. The room is dominated by a 12-channel mixer, the “heart”. The console was specially made for the studio and is based on original circuit diagrams from the electronics companies Pultec and RCA. The signals from the console are then routed to two Telefunken four-track tape machines – and back again so that the recordings can be monitored.
The sound engineer can use an intercom to communicate with the musicians in the recording room and see them through a window. The room on the other side is specially designed: there are no parallel walls so sound waves don’t meet. Wooden panels are attached to it for a “lively”, full sound. In contrast to foam, which is otherwise often used in speech booths, for example, wood breaks up the sound waves instead of absorbing them. In addition to a drum set, a guitar with a Gibson amplifier and a grand piano, there are microphones everywhere in the room, including classics from America, such as the Western Electric 639b, and the “holy grail” of microphones, the Neumann M49.
“We wanted our music to sound like the old records”
The studio is deeply rooted in Praefeck’s passion for 1950s music, clothing and style. “We were a bunch of buddies who actually wanted to make a band. We always met at concerts and looked at other bands. At some point we started making 1950s music ourselves and dressing like that,” he says. With the quiff sitting and the first rehearsed songs came the desire to record their own music.
The band got a tape recorder and recorded rehearsals. The musicians quickly realized that it doesn’t sound like it used to. “We wanted it to sound exactly like what we hear on our records – like Ricky Nelson’s recordings,” says the Berliner. To make the demo tapes sound old and reverberant, he started buying microphones at flea markets. “It started with some small microphones for tape recorders to more professional microphones, which we then used to record.”
This is how the typical 50s sound is created
The next disappointment came when Praefcke wanted to make the first professional recordings with his band. The studios didn’t produce the desired sound: “We noticed that the process by which the recordings were made there can’t be the way it used to be.” At that time, for example, the singer was standing in the recording room with his whole band, he explains.
He doesn’t just create the typical sound of rock’n’roll in his studio with a selection of old microphones. It is also important how he positions them and how loud the musicians play during the recordings. Praefcke and Stoye got the knowledge from books and from photographs that were taken during studio sessions in the 1950s. Of course, they also tried a lot to create certain sounds, and over time routine came.
If the microphones and musicians are in the right position, the music is played, mixed and recorded by the two old tape machines. After that, Praefcke digitizes the tape, saves the recording and sends it to the pressing plant. “Basically, it is an achievement that we can now store analog recordings digitally. That would have been the dream of every studio owner – copying and storing master tapes without loss.” The tapes are then reused until they lose quality or are sold to the musicians.
Lightning Recorders specializes in rock ‘n’ roll, but other genres are welcome as well. Praefcke said that singer-songwriters have already recorded their titles “Bob Dylan-style”. “It was something completely different, without noise, boom, bang and rock.” Jazz musicians and poets were also in his studio. “I’m happy about everyone who makes different music – including rock music. It was later made in the same production facilities and with the same microphones as Rock ‘n’ Roll. Only the music sounded different in the end,” says the sound engineer. “Rock music was simply miked differently and that’s it.”
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