In September 2016 I was invited to meet Erika Amoore and David Elmsly for coffee. A year later, on 30 September 2017, the first SYNTHONY show played the Auckland Town Hall with the Auckland Symphony Orchestra. I have been its arranger and show director ever since.

Eighty-eight shows later, every note the orchestras have played is mine. More than 200 charts, written one at a time over nine years, and with them the sound of the show itself: what a symphony orchestra is actually for when it meets electronic music, where the strings sit against a drop, when to let the orchestra lead and when to get out of the way. None of that existed before the first night. It was worked out in front of audiences, and it is still being worked out now.

The show has played sixteen countries with around twenty different orchestras, from sixteen players on a corporate stage to sixty-eight at the Dr Phillips Center in Orlando. The London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic, the Auckland Philharmonia, Orchestra Wellington, the Christchurch and Dunedin Symphony Orchestras, the Queensland and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, Perth Symphony, The Metropolitan Orchestra, the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Desert in Monterrey. Twelve conductors. More than ninety guest artists.

Almost every one of those orchestras sees the music for the first time on the day. One rehearsal, in a genre most of them do not play daily, and it has to hold together by the downbeat. Getting that right, in a different city with a different band of players every few weeks, is the job underneath the job. I prepare and distribute the materials for every performance worldwide and keep every chart consistent across all of it.

Show director on SYNTHONY covers three roles at once. I direct the show, call it, and run playback. Most of that work happens before anyone is in the room: stage plans, run sheets, patches, triggers, and the cue structure built from scratch for every performance, up to eight hundred camera, stage and host cues in a single show. On the day the job is different. It means working across the orchestra, the conductor, the artists and the production team at the same time, so that what we built and what was rehearsed is what the audience gets.

It has played Formula 1 in Las Vegas, the world's largest floating stadium at Marina Bay in Singapore, the Sydney Opera House, and the opening of Sindalah Island in Neom, where the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra performed with Alicia Keys. Duco Events produces.

Wherever it plays, whoever plays it, the charts are mine.