People often ask me, “How do you hear the various parts that you put into an orchestration—like the violin section or the woodwinds, etc.?” Well, I’ve been listening to music all my life and visualizing an orchestra playing—seeing the various players playing and then essentially closing my eyes and imagining the sound. Once the bass line and melody of a song are established, it’s just a matter of imagination and then putting on paper or actually playing one’s imagination.

Most importantly to me is that the orchestration must enhance the lyric of a song and, of course, the emotion behind the lyric. After all, music, if it’s anything at all, is emotion. It touches one’s feelings like no other language. So I orchestrate the emotions of the song and the lyrics are my guide.

Probably the best training that I ever had in life as a composer did not come from music school, but rather from a professional acting school, The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater, where I studied acting back in my 20s with a master teacher named Sanford Meisner—one of the fathers of American Method Acting. The training I got from that two-year experience was invaluable to my life as an artist and especially a composer and record producer.

I also spent several years, with my wife, Julia Wade, going to Carnegie Hall in NYC and listening to and watching the Philadelphia Orchestra, my favorite orchestra. Sitting in the balcony and watching the players play, the violins and cellos bow, the woodwinds breathe, the percussionists thrill, and actually seeing how the various sounds were being created was an experience far beyond any music school as well. Those concerts were forever burned into my musical imagination and to this day, when I’m working, I can shut my eyes and sit in that balcony and let my informed imagination simply pour forth its imaginings.