There are two extremes in the mastering business: the big-league studios, which are typically located in the major recording markets, staffed by world-renowned engineers, and stocked with the latest state-of-the-art equipment; and the little basement shops that consist of a small workstation and an owner/operator who calls himself a mastering engineer by simple virtue of being able to operate that workstation. There's not much in between, except for Alan Douches' West West Side Music in the New York suburb of Tenafly, N.J. Douches may have started out as a mastering engineer by default, but he has since evolved into a much in-demand craftsman with an impressive studio and a track record of nearly 2,000 albums. "It's been an interesting turn in the mastering world, where every mixing studio suddenly has a Finalizer, and they're mastering their own mixes," says Douches. "But then they're finding out that it's not really what they wanted. "To me mastering is about accumulating subtleties," continues Douches, who gained his first insights into the mastering process by attending sessions with Sterling Sound veterans George Marino and Greg Calbi. "When I'm sitting in that chair listening to music, I can tell in about five seconds about the frequency response and the dynamic response. "With an hourly rate of under $100 and a faithful clientele of mostly independent labels -- including Caroline, Jade Tree, Victory, Century Media, Revelation, and Another Planet -- Douches has carved out a niche for himself as the engineer of choice for customers who can't afford the top-level facilities but want the skills and attention to detail of a seasoned engineer, as well as the equipment that goes with it. Douches has also distinguished himself in the mastering profession by using Pro Tools as his digital audio workstation. A faithful user of Digidesign software since the Sound Designer days, Douches grew with the system as it progressed from that initial platform to Sound Tools and, later, Pro Tools. (His wife, Rose, still uses an old Mac II running Sound Designer I to do voice-overs for local radio stations.)
Alan Douches' current rig consists of a Macintosh 9600 running Pro Tools|24 with Version 4.3 software. To get audio in and out of the computer, he uses a combination of a Digidesign 888|24 I/O and an Apogee AD-8000. Even though West West Side offers a generous compliment of analog outboard gear -- including Pendulum tube EQs and compressors, and Massenburg EQs -- he avails himself of various Pro Tools plug-ins, expressing a particular preference for the Focusrite d2 equalizer and d3 compressor/limiter. Douches also uses Digidesign MasterList CD to create the final masters that leave his studio, which get burned on his trusty Yamaha CD-100 drive. Since Douches has spent virtually every working hour in the past several years sitting behind a computer terminal running Pro Tools, his speed of operation is virtually unrivaled. "I'll do an edit before people even realize I did it," says Douches. "Just merely by looking at [the session] and saying, 'OK, we want to replace this chorus with this chorus here.' Visually, what you see is what the music is, rather than some of these approximations that other workstations show you. "Because many of the albums Douches masters in Pro Tools were also recorded, edited, and/or mixed in Pro Tools, he suggests that his clients mix in stems and bring those stems to the mastering session. That allows him to fine-tune mixes right in the mastering studio -- a practice that prevails among the world-class facilities but is rare at the indie level. On occasion, Douches finds himself going as far as adding reverb to snare drums or overdubbing guitar and vocal parts onto finished masters. If such techniques blur the line between recording, mixing, and mastering, that's just as well for Douches. After all, he started out as a recording engineer, apprenticing at Grand Slam Studios in West Orange, N.J., and then going independent as an assistant to Jack Douglas in the early '80s, when the veteran producer was in the spotlight for his Grammy winning work on the John Lennon and Yoko Ono Double Fantasy album. It was with Douglas that Douches first attended the mastering sessions at Sterling that would shape his perception of the job. Given Douches' extensive background in the various disciplines of the recording, it's no surprise that West West Side also offers recording and mixing services. Situated in an old dentist's office that was fortuitously built with lead-lined walls to protect the staff against radiation, West West Side features two good-sized isolation booths and a large control room with a modified Sony console. In fact, if the Pro Tools workstation were wheeled out of the room, a client might mistake the West West Side for a recording/mixing space. However, the vast majority of the studio's work is mastering, and Douches is happy to keep it that way. "We've now become the big-gun mastering facility to a lot of our clients," he says proudly. "They say, 'Wow, we're going to Alan now.'" Having established West West Side as a boutique studio that offers a great value to small labels, Douches says his next frontier is to bring surround sound to the indies. "I'd like to do in the 5.1 environment what we've done for the indie labels with the mastering," he says, "bringing the budget down to a reasonable level for them so that they can spend some money on promotion and marketing."
