Petty had been operating a makeshift recording studio in his father's
garage, but in 1954, following the success of the
Norman Petty Trio's version of "
Mood Indigo", Petty acquired an adjacent building at 1313 West 7th Street, which formerly housed a grocery store, and began converting it into a recording studio. The first recording session at the still-unfinished studio was on October 12, 1954, when Jimmy Self recorded "An Old Christmas Card / Blue Christmas". The completed studio had a tracking room with a ceiling, an reception area that also served as an isolation booth, and an control room outfitted it with an
Ampex 401A
tape recorder and a custom
Altec mixer. Instruments and equipment in the studio included Petty's
Hammond B-3 organ and dual
Leslie speaker cabinets, a
Baldwin grand piano, a
celeste, and
Telefunken U 47,
RCA 77-D,
RCA 44BX, and Altec 639 and M21b microphones. The studio also utilized an
echo chamber that Petty had previously built in a space above his father's garage. Holly was pleased with the new recording, and the demo was released as a single, credited to
The Crickets.
Waylon Jennings worked as a
session musician at the studio early in his career, which led to him being hired as Buddy Holly's bassist for the "Winter Dance Party" tour in 1959, just before Holly's fatal plane crash. Petty stopped using the studio in 1969, after building a new 24-track studio in the former Mesa Theater building. The original studio is currently operated as a museum with private tours available by appointment. ==Selected list of recordings (by year)==