At The Panhandle House in Denton, nostalgia attracts some of the best
DENTON – To hear him tell it, Erik Herbst has spent his life chasing sounds.
"I just felt like this is what I needed to do," Herbst said. "I thought, 'Might as well go after it and start going.'"
As he inexplicably and somehow perfectly managed to balance his coffee mug on his knee without spilling a drop onto the rugs below him, Herbst recalled back nearly 30 years ago, when he and a couple college music buddies started a bedroom recording studio in 1995.
"I don't know, it just lit a spark," Herbst remembered. "Something about it clicked with me. Integrating my music with the technical side of things, which I had an interest in, and became fascinated with just recorded sound and how to make things sound good in a recording."
After two years of projects, songwriting and recording demos in a small rental house in Denton on Panhandle Street, it was 1997 and time to invest in a real studio — the same building he's in now, on Locust Street.
Between his brother Mark and his now-wife Jill, The Panhandle House became a family business — and Herbst always knew the kind of sound he was looking for.
Much of his gear is from an entirely different era.
"This is a vintage Neve recording console," Herbst explained, gesturing to the machine that takes up most of the space in his control room. "Probably built in the mid-70s. It's super iconic. There were not a whole lot of these made."
Though it took him a while to pay off the machine, he said the real payoff came a lot earlier.
"It's amazing," Herbst recalled. "You just turn around and you see the grin on their face, and you just know, 'Okay, this is right.' I feel like it's sounding right. But when I see them smiling and kind of nodding their heads and being like, 'Yeah.' You know, it's a great feeling."
He's tapped into his love of the past and made a career out of it.
"I felt like listening to a decade behind what my peers were, always," Herbst said. "Fascinated with the older records. There's something about them that just moved me. I think there's an emotional quality for me, personally. So I designed a studio that definitely participates in that lineage."
From the Persian-inspired rugs on the floor to the Bohemian lamps flickering above, it's not just the equipment that hearkens back to a different time.
"I love creating an atmosphere where people feel a little bit comfortable," Herbst said of his design process. "I think the studio can be intimidating to people that come in sometimes, if they don't have a ton of experience, they get nervous."
But nostalgia can do wonders for nerves, and cultivate some loyal followers.
"The barrier to entry for modern recording studios is a laptop and a couple hundred bucks of software," Herbst said. "There are records that are made that way. So it has become a labor of love, but also connecting with the artists that also want to make that record in that way, and we have a place that we can do that."
Artists like the Eli Young Band, who was just in for a session a few weeks ago. Blake Shelton, Norah Jones, even The Eagles have crossed the threshold at The Panhandle House — all for a taste of an earlier time.