Songs with a mission - People of all faiths and from all over record their music at Studio 501

By TIMOTHY ALEX AKIMOFF / Photographed by LINDA THOMPSON of the Missoulian

Take a video tour of Studio 501

LAKESIDE - It’s not exactly Nashville, Tenn., but there is a lot of music coming out of Lakeside these days.

Studio 501 isn’t flashy or pretentious, it’s not some acoustically magical cave, and the Beatles never recorded here, but the unassuming studio hidden in the pine trees behind this town of 1,951 is drawing a lot of attention.

“The atmosphere here is very relaxed,” said Steve Praetzel, the studio manager. “We’re not drawn to make a specific amount of money to keep our heads above water.”

That’s because Studio 501 is a project of Youth With A Mission, an interdenominational missions organization focusing on young people and serving communities worldwide in the areas of evangelization, training and mercy ministries.

Johan Bester leaves Studio 501 on Wednesday afternoon. The recording studio is located on the Youth With A Mission campus in the town of Lakeside. Photo by LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian

The Youth With A Mission campus in Lakeside serves as a training center for missionary students interested in the arts, sports and in biblical studies, and is one of more than a thousand ministry locations in over 149 countries.

“It started as a primary way to satisfy a need for something in Youth With A Mission,” Praetzel said. “There were not a lot of studios out there, and a lot of artists who wanted to record but had nowhere to do it, being missionaries and all.”

Because the studio operates as a ministry within the larger structure of YWAM, (pronounced WYE-wam) as it is called, it gives the professional volunteers who run the studio less incentive to focus on highly profitable projects to stay afloat and more incentive to focus on the artistry of professional recording.

“Clients come in and realize I’m not worried about the clock and they don’t have to be worried about the clock,” Praetzel said. “They focus on the art. They’re much more comfortable, enjoying what they’re hearing, and we end up getting a better performance because they’re not so nervous about time.”

And though this studio is affiliated with a Christian missionary organization, they don’t just work with Christian artists.

“We don’t separate it into the sacred/secular thing,” Praetzel said of defining music as either religiously sacred, or worldly and unconcerned with religion. “We’ve done Christian albums and quote secular albums.”

And it’s not difficult, in a community of less than 2,000 people, (for most of the year) to find out about a multitrack recording studio in your backyard.

Praetzel said Studio 501, which he helped start in the early ’90s, began helping with production for local bands and area schools.

“It’s hard to work with a school and not see kids who want to be in a rock band,” Praetzel said. “They’d hear we have a studio, and they’re surprised that it’s here.”

While Studio 501 works with local musicians like Tim Torgerson and others, certain aspects appeal to a broad range of musicians and recording interests.

Because of the studio’s size and ability to be reconfigured into almost any recording scenario for large groups, it has attracted national attention.

“It’s been some local bands,” Praetzel said. “Then we’ve had bizarre interest from as far away as Oregon and Florida.”

Part of the reason for the national interest is in the lower rates and lower-pressure atmosphere of Studio 501, but much of it has to do with the fact that because of the studio’s location at the YWAM campus, which was once a U.S. Air Force base, entire bands can come and work together in one place with housing and food factored into the cost of recording.

The band that came from Oregon signed on because “it was cheaper to pack up their entire band and families and stay for three weeks than stay locally in Portland and record there,” Praetzel said.

And even though Studio 501 has state-of-the-art equipment, small professional studios are not that rare anymore.

“The way the recording industry has gone, this isn’t such an isolated thing anymore,” Praetzel said. “You can have a studio tucked away in somebody’s house; there are a lot of home studios these days.”

And musicians are not traveling to various studios to achieve different sounds as much anymore, because the Internet has made it easier to record artists wherever they are located and then send the recording to another studio over the Internet.

“There was this album produced in New York, but the artist was on vacation here,” Praetzel said. “She could come in here, record her vocals and we shipped it off to New York.”

In fact Praetzel, and one of his assistants, Wells Edward Dycus, have worked on numerous projects where they contributed a bass line, drum track or vocals to a bigger project elsewhere.

“It kind of surprised me,” Praetzel said. “As an engineer, I didn’t see that coming.”

Dycus, an accomplished musician who is more interested in the production side of things, said that learning engineering is important for producers.

“It’s nice to be able to crack (a track) open and look at,” Dycus said. “To see what’s wrong and to be able to get a good mix and know why.”

People like Dycus, who came from Wyoming, often end up in Lakeside to work with one YWAM ministry or another and stay on for many years.

Others, particularly a number of international students, come from a few months up to a year or more to work with YWAM or participate in the various training programs.

“It adds a lot of flavor to the community,” Praetzel said.

As a community, Lakeside has grown up in the 18 years since Praetzel helped start Studio 501.

“It’s grown a lot,” he said. “We seen the larger developments, condos going up right on the lake,” he said. “It’s good to see development, but there is also that inherent Montana thing saying, 'I’d really like to see the lake.’ ”

Studio 501 has allowed him to get into the arts community in Lakeside and around the Flathead Valley, Praetzel said.

“It’s been something that’s been fun to be a part of,” he said. “They don’t see us as something strange off on the hill. They say, 'Oh, they’ve got a studio, they’re people. too.’”