Priest River couple turns home into recording studio, music safe haven

PRIEST RIVER — At 5, Brittane Barker told me she enjoyed writing songs to escape from her reality. Although she grew up with a profound understanding that running water and shelter is a luxury and not a right, it is worth noting that Brittane did not complain. Instead, she redirected our conversation to what she built for herself, one music note at a time.

“I have always loved music ever since I was little, just people doing music, writing music, all the instruments involved,” Brittane said. “It really drew me to it and being able to write, for me, is such an amazing outlet. You write a song and you feel so much better afterwards.”

Brittane explained that she has always been motivated by music, recalling the day where she was attracted to a guitar that lit up the school hallway with music flying from a boy’s finger tips. It may have been the dancing guitar that first attracted Brittane, but she married the man who’s shoulder it rested on and they’ve been making music together ever since.

Brittane’s humble beginnings as a singer began when friends convinced her to sing the national anthem for the football, basketball and wrestling games at Priest River Lamanna High School. Her biggest fan in the stands, Margie Day, remembered being brought to tears the first time Brittane took the stage.

“I was just blown away and I was like this girl needs to go places,” Day said. “I envy her confidence to sing, I would never have that but she does. I have always kind of thought of her as a shy person, she would come alive though when she was doing her daredevil things.”

Day was friend’s with Brittane’s mom, and she vividly remembers a young Brittane hanging with a group of boys, doing donuts on her dirt bike. Inspired by Brittane’s talent, Day reached out to California radio host JD Higgins who aired Brittane’s first Spotify single “Scarred” on his podcast, which now has almost 1,000 views on YouTube. Brittane said her song is about the love she shares for Tyler and the hardship of grieving for her mom’s death in 2016.

“My impression was that she’s driven,” Higgins said. “You know when you talk to somebody and they’ve got it and then others are just kind of getting through the day and they are just waiting until something better happens? Well, Brittanee and Tyler, my impression is that they are focused, they know where they want to go and they’ve also got the talent to back it up.”

Tyler “Amity” Barker and Brittane “Bscog” Barker have spent the last 14 years cultivating the skills needed to provide for North Idaho’s music community. Tyler is the sound engineer, construction worker, producer and instrumentalist while Brittane is the singer and lead song writer. Beyond their talent, Brittane and Tyler were able to bring something back to Priest River — a recording studio.

Together they’ve thrifted an entire studio in the confines of their home, creating a space on the Pacific Northwest shorelines that meets the financial and artistic needs of local artists. This is a resource that was never accessible to Bonner County residents before.

“I actually live with them, we are all roommates and the studio is kind of across the hallway,” Rapper Jonathon “DK” Jamison said. “We are in there every night, as much as we can when we are not working. The studio is punk level, it’s professional grade.”

Jamison is one of Tyler’s clients and closest friends. The three call themselves “The Wolf Pack,” after countless nights spent producing music and pushing themselves to reach their creative potential.

“We started hanging blankets from the ceiling and now we have $4,000 soundboard and $500, couple $600 mics, it’s definitely progression and it looks amazing,” Jamison said.

Building the home studio wasn’t easy, nor was it Britanne and Tyler’s original plan. Tyler moved to Arizona to attend school at the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Science and later took an internship at Studio Trilogy in San Francisco.

“We just didn’t like the city life,” Brittane Barker said. “We thought that we had to be there to make it and be in the city to make good music and make it, we just didn’t like the city because we aren’t used to it and we just decided to come back here and build our own studio, where we like to be in the small town with all of our friends.”

Brittane and Tyler were looking to fill a void with Barker Sound Studio in Oldtown. Prior to the creation of their studio, the closest recording studio was in Spokane, Washington.

“I realized that I could do it anywhere with the internet and you just have to find people,” Tyler said. “We just made one in the place that we lived, a pretty simple set up that could get it done and once we bought this property and house, we decided to take one of the rooms, gut it and remodel it.”

One of Tyler’s first jobs was in construction when he was 18 years old. In merging his music production knowledge from college, he was able to set up a control room, ISO booth and tracking room with acoustics that would meet technical standards. He also transformed their closet into part of the studio. Once the studio was complete, Tyler built a desk and found a console from a studio in California that was being replaced with a newer model. Tyler’s new mission was to decorate the studio with quality equipment, looking out of state to complete his miscellaneous collection.

“I had learned on this (console) in school, so I had experience with it and it’s just a very professional set up for the area we are in,” Tyler said. “I am stoked on it, and everyone who has come and recorded with me is super happy already, which is great feedback.”

Both Tyler and Brittane are looking to present affordable opportunities for musicians that don’t want to leave their hometown to produce music. As an added incentive, Tyler is offering the first song for free, in the hopes that he will continue to build clientele. Currently Tyler has over 100 contacts and is looking to steadily fill the studio with two to three musicians per day. So far their clients come from Spokane, Spirit Lake, Priest River, Sandpoint and Coeur d’Alene.

Film composer and music producer Richard Gibbs’ Woodshed Recording Studio in Malibu is one of the top recording studios in the country. His advice for upcoming producers and engineers like Brittane and Tyler is to consider the environment and the vibe of the room, more than the technical quality of the studio. He had countless arguments with sound engineers in the past who resisted his ocean view windows open layout. In the end, his recording studio has become popular for musicians like Bono and Pink because you can hear the effect of the studio in the song. “The most valuable thing I have in my studio is the musicians,” he said.

And Tyler and Brittane both seem to be following suit.

“It’s just all about relationships and creating a bond, letting them know my background and my knowledge and my experience and also that actually the biggest thing that I have found in my experience is I want their vision to come true,” Tyler said. “It’s their song and their music, I am not going to tell them what’s right or what’s wrong and I want them to know that. It’s all about them when the artist is in the studio and I feel like I make that happen well.”

Aly De Angelus can be reached by email at adeangelus@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @AlyDailyBee.