his is a Mission Earth album piece – first album – ‘Joy City.’

“Now this is a very tricky piece, and it’s got a lot of gimmicks to it. But first off I’m going to play you an organ arrangement of it, just to show you that it goes together as a piece of music.”

So began a typical audio cassette of an LRH composition. The use of such cassettes was his unique means of conveying the essence of compositions to studio musicians and arrangers. And those cassettes did, indeed, convey all one needed to know: melody, lyrics, instrumentation, and even the employment of natural sounds – all delineated in precise detail.

For example: “Now you will note that this melody has a very dirty bass horn. And this is a fairly dirty bass horn. Now don’t get a melodious bass horn, you want a dirty bass horn. This is an interesting trick of reversals whereby you have chorded actions that would normally be in the bass taking place in the treble.”

Or: “If you’ll notice, there’s a first melody, a bass and a bass interlude, and then a second melody and another bass interlude, and then it goes back to the first melody and the first bass interlude. In other words, there’s two types of bass riffs, there’s the ones you heard at the very end and then there’s the regular bass riffs that just keep going through the piece.”

Nor was the flow only one way. When arrangements were complete – and this was true for all Ron’s albums – cassettes were sent back to Ron for review. Also included were suggestions for possible orchestration and similar artistic input – as when his musicians suggested the bass and trumpet solos Ron incorporated into the “Mining Song” from the Battlefield Earth album. Similarly, when Ron received suggestions that choral and symphonic sections be added to a melody, he replied with a whole new arrangement that, as one musician remarked, “actually went well beyond anything we had imagined – innovative and perfect.”

Also routinely heard on the cassettes was Ron at his drum kit to demonstrate a rhythm as in: “Here is a rhythm, a drum rhythm or a bass rhythm, that can go with it. If you will notice here, there are two sets of drums in use and one is higher than the other. Well, the higher drum is the echo drum. It just goes along like this through the piece.”

Then, of course, there were his instructions relating to the employment of such natural sounds as electric air brakes, conductor’s voice, slurping straw and buzz of a crowd in his “Joy City” from the Mission Earth album.

While as for the placement of those sounds, he typically included such detailed notes as: “These sound effects occur at each bass riff point between the two melodies.”

The net result is exactly the sum of all that Ron delineated in such cassettes: Three entire albums, dozens of film scores, and a whole catalog of songs that effectively begin with, “Here is the melody...”