Crunch Recording Group of Toronto recently finished work on the soundscape that is being featured on all dates of the Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon Tour. Crunch co-owner Steve Pecile, who created the soundscape with fellow sound designers Scott Murdoch and Dany Tremblay, discusses the process.

The Crunch design team created the Bridges to Babylon soundscape using three Pro Tools systems concurrently and then blended their work for mixer Ric Jurgens.

Pro Tools allowed us to work separately and then easily combine our ideas for the finished product, which had more than 40 layers in it. And the Pro Tools extensive automation and dsp tools made mix revisions a breeze.

Mixing for large stadiums was accomplished with Genelec 1038s (courtesy of Genelec and Tascam Canada).

The 1038 had all the bottom needed to simulate the subs in a live pa. Chris Tootell and Bob Simpson (Genelec and Tascam) were very gracious in allowing us access to the Genelecs.

The whole project began when Xtreme Graphix of Toronto began working on the animation portion of the opening with Stones video director Dick Carruthers. As the idea developed, Carruthers felt some level of sound design would augment the curtain opening and the meteor animation.

The first creative meeting saw Carruthers, creative director and lighting designer Patrick Woodroffe and Crunch co-owner Joe Serafini hash out the storyline and creative direction of the soundscape that would eventually open the Rolling Stones show.

The meeting lasted several hours and resulted in a complex and layered creative that the sound designers would now have to turn into a reality.

After the meeting, Serafini and I mapped out how Crunch would go about the task. It was determined that dividing the creative into three distinct parts would make the task more manageable.

Each designer then went about their section aided by a Pro Tools iii system equipped with tdm and a vast array of plug-in audio processors, including Focusrite eq, TC Electronics reverb, and the entire family of Digidesign dsp tools.

My station also included a TDM Samplecell card that allowed multiple sound effects to be layered, pitched and played directly from a keyboard.

The Digidesign TDM Matrix allows sound to be bussed, processed and mixed in a 24-bit environment without ever having to leave the Pro Tools application. Jurgens finished off the project in a 32-track Pro Tools system and mastered it via a tc finalizer digitally to dat.

Because the full pa was not set up in the hangar where the crew was making pre-tour adjustments, the Crunch team had to make changes based on what they thought it would sound like with 50,000 Stones fans present. To that end, Serafini decided to accompany the crew out to Chicago to make sure the first concert sounded right. Luckily, no major changes were needed.

Says Serafini: ‘The best thing about working with the Stones and their crew was the incredible level of professionalism.’ Even Mick took time out to contribute to the final mix, he says.