Brent Chamberlin, Audio Solutions Specialist at Audio-Technica U.S., Inc.
“I work in the Audio Solutions Department. My title is technically Audio Solutions Specialist. We do troubleshooting and application support. We’re sort of a think-tank for Audio-Technica.”
Are you providing support to both solo artists as well as the major companies that use your products?
“We have a wide span of products. In our consumer products we have our turntables and headphones, and so we talk to people on those products…stuff like how to set up their turntables [since] a lot of people are getting back into those. Then we also have our professional line of products. So that would be our live microphones, our studio microphones, wireless systems, and then a lot of installed sound equipment as well. So we’re really jumping back and forth between phone calls, emails, handling just really a wide range of different situations that come up. So we have to jump back and forth.”
What budget-friendly mics do you recommend for hip hop production?
“I usually start people who are on a budget with our 40 series microphones…They’re really versatile in a lot of different applications. My first set of Audio-Technica microphones were the 4050 microphones. Those are very popular still to this day, for a lot of different people…There’s a lot of producers down in Nashville that use the 4050 for a bunch of instruments, then they take it into the control room and do their vocals with it as well. It’s a large diaphragm microphone, but it’s a multipattern mic. So it gives you the cardioid pickup, your standard 120 degree pickup, [and] omni-direction as well as bi-directional or figure 8 pattern. So in a way you’re getting three microphones in one.
For hip hop, the
AT4040 is a very popular microphone, and it doesn’t have a big price tag on it…If their budget is a little bit higher, I would look at the 4047 microphone. It’s an FET microphone, so you get a little bit more warmth to it almost like a tube microphone. A lot of people I’ve talked to have said that’s their desert island microphone that, if they can only pick one microphone to go with, that’s what they would take with them.”
So what’s your advice for people looking to get their first job in audio?
“I would say never stop learning, and be willing to work anything you can. Everybody wants to be the rock star. Everybody wants to be the audio engineer that’s mixing and mastering and producing all the latest, greatest albums. But there’s really a lot of other things to do in the industry. And whether it be working for a manufacturer like Audio-Technica, whether it be working in sales, there’s a lot of different aspects of audio, even in broadcasting as well as mixing audio for video, [and] a lot of television stations…Just be open to work what’s in front of you.”
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