About us
The Mission
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Parker House Studios doubles as a house — and we want to make you feel right at home. Comfort is key to getting the greatest recording performances. 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 charge by the hour — we charge by the song. Transparency and honesty are important to us. You won’t get any sudden bills or unexpected charges. Once you pay for the song, we see it through ‘til the end — and that’s our promise. There’s also no reason to rush; when we record, 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 with vocal isolation, a drum and instrument recording room, and a live room with reflective wood floors and walls for reverberant and roomy sounds. We believe the space lends itself to comfort and inspiration, and when you record here, you can make yourself at home.
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Parker House doesn’t charge by the hour, we charge by the song — so once you buy a song, we see it through until it’s finished. We believe this pricing structure is honest, fair, and helpful for artists. We don’t hit you with random bills or charges. And since we don’t do hourly, you don’t have to get your band together miraculously to all track on the same day, just to rush through it anyways — they can come in when convenient.
We currently offer five different pricing tiers:
Full Song Production ($500/song) — This gets you a fully produced song from beginning to end, from pre-production to the final master. We record, mix, and master your song.
Day rate ($300/8 hrs) and half-day rate ($150/4 hrs) — If you’re from out of town passing through, you’re bringing your own producer, or you’ve got others that you’d like to handle post-production, this is the tier for you.
Mixing only ($200/song) — If you’ve got a recorded work and need us to mix it, we’ve got you covered on this one.
Mastering only ($75/song) — You’ve got a fully mixed song, but it’s not quite commercialized yet. We’ll master it for you to sound good everywhere.
Editing ($100/song) — Timing is important. If you’ve got raw recordings but they’re not quite tuned and edited, holler at us for this tier.
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. 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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We operate a simple, streamlined setup with equipment that owner Andrew Akins knows well and knows works well. Our console is a Behringer WING Compact, renowned for its frequency and dynamics processing. That records straight into Pro Tools, where we have access to hundreds of plugins, from Universal Audio to Plugin Alliance to iZotope.
Our microphones are as follows:
TechZone Audio Stellar X2 and Stellar X2 Vintage
Golden Age Project R1 Passive (2)
sE Electronics V Kick, V7 X, V Beat (3), sE8 (2)
Shure SM57
MXL 4000 and 603 S
Solomon LoFreq
Sennheiser e609
We also have these instruments:
Fender Stratocaster
PRS SE Singlecut
Squire Jazz Bass with Fender pickups
Yamaha AC13-M
Custom nylon acoustic guitar
Harmonica set
Fully weighted 88-key Casio keyboard with hundreds of synth, piano, instrument, and drum sound plugins
Baldwin upright piano
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.