About us
The Mission
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What would it look like to make and release music without difficulty? That question is why Parker House Studios was started. We aim to lower the barrier as much as possible for artists of all kinds to create high quality music. We believe that helping bands and artists create excellent music is investing in the future health and beauty of our culture. We’ve built Parker House on four tenants of how we serve artists: hospitality, transparency, relationships, and quality.
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Parker House Studios bears the distinction of being both an actual house and a fully functioning studio — and we want to make you feel right at home. Comfort is key to getting the greatest recording performances, and it’s something we care deeply about cultivating. More than that, our door is always open to you — and we mean that. Hospitality is the most important virtue of our business.
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At Parker House, we don’t typically charge by the hour — we charge by the song. Transparency and honesty are important to us, and we want all of the artists we work with to know exactly what they’re getting into. You won’t get any sudden bills or unexpected charges. Once you pay for a service, we see it through ‘til the end — and that’s our promise. There’s also no reason to rush; we take the time to get it right, and we don’t track the hours — so you’re not up against the clock.
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Owner Andrew Akins is adamant about building relationships as a key to being the best studio in Amarillo. Once we open our door, you become family to us. We care about your well-being, and we care about making your project everything you dreamed of — and more.
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We strive for top-shelf quality on every project we touch, and we care deeply about making things sound awesome, no matter the genre. Our space is uniquely suited for creativity and comfortability. These things together make for our unmatched consistency. You can rest assured every release Parker House produces will sound as good as any recording studio out there.
The Method
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Parker House Studios is named as such because it actually is a house. Owners Andrew and Danica Akins turned their two-bedroom home into a convertible studio in early 2025, leveraging the unique historic layout and charm to spark creativity and functionality. It offers a full control room and two recording rooms — a dry room (known as the den) for vocals and instruments, and a live room (known as the cabin) with reflective walls and original wood floor for especially vibey tracking. You can say goodbye to long, intimidating sessions at high dollar studios — we believe our space lends itself to comfort and inspiration, and when you record here, you can make yourself at home.
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Parker House has multiple pricing tiers to suit your needs, whether it be full song production, renting the studio space for a day, or post-production services. Our pricing structure is based around flat- or per-song-fees, meaning you don’t get hit with unexpected bills or cut corners trying to beat the clock. We believe in being fair, honest, and transparent — artists should know exactly how much they’re going to pay. We are also committed to being budget friendly and flexible, making the barrier to working with us as low as possible.
Please note additional charges may incur for special-case services (such as vinyl masters) or if session musicians are brought in for projects — but don’t worry, we always communicate with you beforehand to make sure that’s something you actually want before we do it. We don’t do anything without your green light.
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To us, a project doesn’t begin when you walk in to record — it begins long before that. That’s where our Full Production Service comes in. At Parker House, we want to help you lay the groundwork for an amazing release by serving as your producer — and that means scheduling production meetings, helping you arrange the song, giving constructive criticism, and injecting our ideas into the mix. We do all this before we ever hit record, so that when we finally do track your song, the quality and vision are easy to attain. Our open lines of communication and listening ears ensure that your work will get where you want it to go.
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Parker House utilizes a hybrid analog-digital workflow to record tracks that are on-par with vintage recording consoles. Artists are tracked through either Neve-style or API-style preamps, depending on the song and instrument. These are lined-in to the console, a Behringer WING Compact, which passes the signal through its award-winning digital processing — vintage EQs, compressors, and tape saturation. This all ends up in Pro Tools, where the audio can be edited and mixed. We also like to mix songs back through the console for a streamlined workflow and some extra warmth.
Our microphones include studio standards like the Neumann U87ai, Sennheiser e609, and Shure SM57; several faithful recreations, such as the TechZone Stellar X2 (U87 style) and Stellar X2 Vintage (U67 style), the MXL 4000 (FET47 style), and MXL 603S (KM84 style); and trending modern staples like sE’s V Kick, V Beat (3), V7X, sE8 (2), Golden Age Project R1 (2), and Solomon LoFreq.
Our instruments include an antique Baldwin upright piano (renowned for its impressive warmth), a Fender Stratocaster, a PRS SE Singlecut, a Fender Squire Jazz Bass with custom pickups (the most versatile bass we’ve ever used), a Yamaha AC13-M acoustic guitar, a custom nylon acoustic guitar, a fully-weighted 88-key Casio Privia (including a large library of MIDI instruments), and a harmonica set for your especially bluesy days.
The Magic
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So you’ve written a song. Where do you get started to get it recorded and released? At Parker House, we believe having a producer is the most important step to getting an incredible track. We want to help you be well-prepared for recording, a process known as pre-production. Essentially, we help you arrange the song, cast vision for the vibe, decide on what elements it will include, and record a working demo that we can throw ideas at to see what works. Once the demo is recorded, we type out production notes that will be sent to each player, and we start preparing for tracking. This is all done with you in the room helping make the decisions with us as a team.
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Once we have the pre-production done, the real production starts. We get your band in here, or we call our incredibly talented friends to play on your record (prices vary per musician), and we record the song — either part by part, or live altogether, depending on the project and the artist. During this step, we make our engineering decisions based on the vision and vibe we casted during pre-production, and we aim to be as creative and high-quality as possible.
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After recording, we edit the performances in Pro Tools to sound cohesive. The amount of editing truly does depend on the song and the players, but we always strive for one thing — that it sounds human and authentic. That means when we tune vocals, we don’t do full-on autotune. It also means we won’t make your drummer sound robotic. And hey, if something isn’t to your liking, you can always just let us know and we’ll make it right.
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Once we’ve edited the song, we get to a really fun step in the process — mixing. This is where we take the song track by track and make things shine, whether it be huge, punchy drums, or making an acoustic guitar sound fuller; the possibilities are endless. This is also where we make everything fit together better tonally and dynamically so that everything has a place and the song sounds exactly like you dreamed. We also add effects during this stage like reverbs and delays. This is where we get to be continuously creative to reach that vibe your song is going for.
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Finally, we get to mastering. This is where we “commercialize” the song, making it competitively loud for the genre, and ensuring the mix translates well to multiple different playback contexts. We also use this step to send you the song in its completed form to see how you like the mix / master. If something isn’t quite to your liking, you have free revisions until we get it done and you’re proud of it.
After you sign off on the final master, we send you the final .wav file, as well as a “Credits” document and “Specs” document. These just outline who played what on your record, and the technical specifications of your release for your record-keeping.