ARRANGER

In 1974 L. Ron Hubbard organized several musical groups from crew aboard his research vessel, Apollo, with the purpose to provide entertainment at the regular ports of call. Oftentimes arranging their musical compositions, Ron also exactingly drilled them, sometimes note by note, to consistently perform highly successful concerts throughout the Mediterranean and the Caribbean.

At the forefront of this Apollo entertainment were the Apollo Stars and what became known as “Star Sound.”

“Studying the more popular groups,” L. Ron Hubbard stated, “listening to their ‘singing,’ listening to their arrangements, instrumentation and drum shifts of emphasis to sticks and by other signs, it became fairly visible, at least to me, that the sophisticated world was rolling back into the past and reaching for its tribal roots.” Whereupon, the Star Sound was born: gregarious and heavily syncopated, with a strong reliance on percussion.

Further, was Ron’s highly innovative research and delineation of what he termed “the Laws of Proportionate Sound,” wherein similar instruments of slightly different timbre were employed to overcome the long troublesome problem of instrumental cancellation, i.e., the sound of one instrument “wiping out” another regardless of volume. Although professionals have devised various remedies, Ron was factually the first to both dissect the problem and define its solution. “It has been known but only as a theory without application that two cannons, fired at each other at the same instant could cancel each other’s sound waves and result in silence. I doubt any scientist ever tried it out. However, the truth is that sound waves ‘can’ cancel sound waves. And this is the basic fact behind Proportionate Sound.”

Indeed, wrote a critic of the day, L. Ron Hubbard solves “a problem the likes of Buddy Rich and even Woody Herman failed to do; that is, focus the energy of a combo in a big band, a feat which is like harnessing the atom.”

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