SAVANNAH — At 8 years old, Phil Hadaway dissected 4-track tape recorders to see how they worked.
He tore apart 8-tracks and, when cassettes came out, went crazy re-editing songs from the radio.
He spent his teens teaching himself how to play guitar, playing in bands and cutting records in a Savannah recording studio.
Not long afterward, he left college and bought that studio.
“I had no idea what I was doing — no business plan,” he said.
“But I really wanted to do it. I was a 20-something-year-old kid with no concept of paying the electric bill.”
His business — 3180 Media Group — works with Grammy-winning musicians and A-list actors. The company did additional recording for the Academy Award-winning “The Cider House Rules” and engineered teen idol Miley Cyrus’ successful CD, “The Time of Our Lives,” which has gone either gold or platinum in seven countries.
“The judge of our success is the success of our clients,” Hadaway, 49, said.
Hadaway was born in Savannah but shortly afterward moved to South Carolina, where his father, the late Dr. Phil Hadaway Jr., studied to be a general practitioner.
The family returned to Savannah when the younger Hadaway was 9.
Soon after becoming a teen, he pestered his way into a job in a downtown music store and performed with local bands.
“We started playing and recording more and more stuff, and around that time, a friend of mine built a really nice recording facility in Savannah. Probably the first true recording studios in Savannah,” Hadaway said.
“Our band recorded there, and [I got] into the production side rather than recording side. I had friends ask me to produce their music. I was doing stuff way before I was able to drive.”
He graduated from the now-closed Hancock Academy and entered Armstrong State University, now Armstrong Atlantic State University.
It didn’t last.
“I said, ‘Man, I’d rather do the recording thing.’ I dropped out of college to the dismay of my parents, but they supported me. I just felt this music thing was calling,” he said.
At the end of 1983, his friend who owned the recording studio moved to another state and put his business on the market. Hadaway bought it in 1984 and named it Reeltime Audio Production. He changed the name officially to 3180 Media Group this month.
“It was all on-the-job training, but I’ve had some good people around me to guide me,” Hadaway said. “Some of my best mentors are my customers. Knowing our customers is incredibly important — we need to know what they’re looking for. To me, they’re a partner. When we go into a project, we need to go into it with the same thought focus.”
Hadaway encourages his staff to cultivate relationships with those partners, find out what they like and remember it.
He knows, for instance, that celebrity chef Robert Irvine is particular about his coffee. Irvine’s order sounds something like “a grande latte, super hot, with three brown sugars and stirred five times to the left.”
In a telephone interview, Irvine said he appreciates that the coffee — at his preferred 200 degrees — is waiting for him when he arrives at Hadaway’s studio. The studio is near Irvine’s Hilton Head Island, S.C., home, but the chef listed another reason he continues working with Hadaway.
“The most important thing is the quality of what he does,” Irvine said.
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