How Bob Ezrin and Andy Jackson Mixed 'Pulse' – Keeping the Crowd Without Losing the Band

For the 1995 live album Pulse, producer Bob Ezrin and engineer Andy Jackson had to solve a classic live-recording puzzle: how do you make a stadium full of 50,000 people feel present without letting their roar bury the band’s precision? Their solution was a meticulous automation-based approach that turned the audience into a controllable instrument rather than a wall of noise.

Ezrin and Jackson worked from multitrack recordings of the 1994 Division Bell tour, using a digital console (a Sony PCM-3348) to write detailed fader rides for the audience microphones. During songs, the crowd mics were pulled back or even gated so that the band’s sound remained as clean as a studio take – think Roger Waters’ bass clarity or David Gilmour’s vocal reverb. But between songs, during applause or the famous “welcome to the machine” moments, the audience tracks were brought up to full blast, recreating that real-time energy. They also used subtle delay and compression on the crowd mics to blend them into the stereo image without distracting from the instruments.

Ezrin later described it as “removing the audience