For one former Southwestern Bell repairman and long-time Norman resident, a newly opened recording studio was a dream come true.

At a rented space in north Norman, Chris Harris flicks one of the many switches spread across the board before him and speaks to somebody he can’t see.

“Were you supposed to hit the cymbals there at the end, Kelli?”

The speaker in front of him crackles to life, spouting the voice of the 11-year-old girl in another room.

“Um, yeah — I think so,” she replies.

The ex-repairman assures her she did well on the 10-second drum take, and after a moment’s exchange, he counts a measure off for her to start again.

After another take — this time finished by that cymbal-crash — young Kelli Mayo emerges from the soundproofed studio to join her bandmate, Peyton Suitor, 15, on the other side of the glass.

Harris rotates his chair away from the vast soundboard and proudly announces that the girls, who write their own punk material under the name Skating Polly, are finished recording drum tracks for the day.

Harris has several reasons to be proud, and the finished take is only one of them. Foremost is the his new recording studio, Hook Echo Sound, that he is working in. It’s not Hook Echo’s first home, but it is the first that Harris hasn’t had complete freedom to operate in.

It’s been a long time in the making — ever since he first started reading Tape Op Magazine for do-it-yourself recorders in 1999, while living in Amber, about 30 miles west of Norman.

“I just fell in love with this magazine and the whole culture behind creative music recording,” he said. “It’s about doing the best you can with what you have available and not fetishizing gear so much.”

Harris began accumulating the necessary equipment and recording in Amber, before moving back to a house in Norman where he would record artists for about nine years.

Harris said Hook Echo’s work steadily grew beyond what he could — and felt comfortable accommodating — in his own home.

As chance had it, Harris’ friend Trent Bell, formerly of the Chainsaw Kittens, had some extra space in his newly expanded Bell Labs Recording Studio and agreed to rent it out to Harris.

“That freed me up to take anybody who called,” Harris said. “I got a lot more clients that way.”

Harris knew he’d eventually need his own space in order to operate without coordinating with another party and, in January, he found what he was looking for.

“It wound up being a month later than I wanted to open it,” he said. “But it did leave me time to do it exactly how I wanted to do it.”

The biggest benefactors of Hook Echo’s new digs are small-time Norman home recorders who want to play and write original music but aren’t able or don’t know how to record it properly, Harris said.

“I want to be an ally to people who record themselves,” Harris said. “I want to help home recorders make better recordings.”

Skating Polly is just one of several bands to benefit from Harris’s help, even more so from the trust built between the two parties.

“The first album we recorded, [Chris] would be a little more hesitant to tell them that a take wasn’t good or something, and I’d go tell them,” said Kelli’s father, David Mayo, “But now, like a minute ago when Kelli screwed something up on the drums, he’s like, ‘Yeah, you can do a lot better than that’ and she says ‘Yeah’.”

Mayo also points out that the market for home recording has increased.

“When I was involved in the Norman music scene, 12 or 14 years ago or whenever it was, there were like three or four really good bands,” David Mayo said. “But now, there’s a bunch of them who are really good. I don’t think people appreciate as much as they should or they don’t realize it.”