Good Listener

by Steve Carter | Modern Luxury Dallas magazine | December 23, 2011

When I catch up with MediaTech Institute president and founder Russell Whitaker, it’s by phone. He’s just driven his RV to an open house at MediaTech’s newest location in Oceanside, Calif., accompanied by Leo, his charismatic Pomeranian. An avid surfer since his youth, Whitaker, 57, says, “I opened the school here because it’s just 300 yards from the beach.” And for a man who’s worked with luminaries Stevie Ray Vaughan, Willie Nelson, Asleep at the Wheel and Phil Collins, who built Dallas Sound Lab at the Dallas Communications Complex in 1980 and founded MediaTech Institute in 1999, Whitaker is surprisingly unassuming—maybe it’s the ocean air? In a notoriously tough business, Whitaker has managed to thrive. From his first MediaTech campus in Las Colinas, the institute has now expanded to Austin, Houston and Oceanside, becoming one of the most respected audio engineering and film schools in the nation (mediatech.edu).

Whitaker played drums and guitar as a kid in Houston; after graduation, the Pacific lured him to California. “I was playing in a band out there and went into a recording studio to make a demo,” he recalls. “I just fell in love with recording... I went mad.” By ’75 he was back in Texas, studying to become an electronic technician and converting his Austin house into a recording studio; it was there that he engineered early demos for Vaughan. Gradually his recording business grew. In the late ’70s, when Whitaker learned that 20th Century Fox was moving to Dallas to build a movie lot at the burgeoning Dallas Communications Complex, he heard opportunity knocking. His 1980 migration to Las Colinas proved to be the right move at the right time. Dallas Sound Lab quickly became the go-to gold standard studio complex in the Southwest. But the landscape began to shift ominously with the advent of digital recording. It was a technological sea change that brought affordable home recording to the masses and sounded a death knell for many traditional studios.

Reading the handwriting on the wall, Whitaker switched gears, repurposing DSL for what was to become the first MediaTech Institute. “The timing was perfect,” he says. “As the school was going up, the studio business was going down, and the school kept me afloat.” MediaTech’s growth since 1999 has been remarkable. The Austin campus opened two years later and the Houston facility the following year; Oceanside opened in 2011. Today, all four campuses offer the Recording Arts Program, a 44-week diploma program that teaches audio engineering and studio technique, live sound reinforcement, postproduction audio and other key pieces of cutting-edge media know-how. The Dallas and Oceanside campuses also feature a digital film and video arts program. Austin and Houston will join those ranks soon. More program offerings are under development, and a new Dallas campus opens this year. Whitaker adds, “It’s going to be good!” Bet on it.