Fifty years of night shows, told straight.

You've probably been to a Disney park and seen one of their parades. You may even have noticed how the music surrounds you and seems to envelop and move down the street with the floats. Don's work has directly changed the way Disney creates and stages parades at its theme parks around the world.

Don started a consulting relationship with Disney in 1975, when he was asked to create a unique new musical sound for the Bicentennial pageant America on Parade. He did so by combining the sounds of synthesizers with those of antique carrousel organs. The staging of this parade (the largest ever built by Disney at the time) also required some tricky audio playback coordination; Disney parks had seven different audio zones, and each zone needed to be cued in advance so that a 7-minute "pre-show" would conclude exactly as the floats arrived, and not a moment sooner. Don spent many months on rooftops with a stopwatch, studying float movement and giving cues via headset to an audio technician armed with the volume control knobs. As a result of Don's coordination and timing work, Disney was persuaded to begin development on a computer system to handle the float tracking and audio coordination tasks. The first Mickey Track control system was completed and implemented in 1980 with software designed to Don's specifications.

Mickey Track was in operation until 1991 when Don's latest design was implemented as DECS (Disney Entertainment Control System). DECS featured all-digital audio playback, automated intelligent show and stage management decisions, tracked the position of floats and told them what music to play and when, matched each of the 200 wayside speakers with the float music as they pass by, and triggered show lighting, on-board effects and animation. Initially developed for use only at the Disneyland Resort in California, DECS was later adopted for use at Disneyland Paris and Hong Kong Disneyland.

In 2011, with the construction of Shanghai Disneyland underway, the continued rapid development of show technology combined with the continued innovation of Disney parade designers, another system redesign and upgrade was called for. Once again, Don worked with the Disney team to design and specify a new version of Parade Control. 2015 saw the first rollout of the new Conductor system at Walt Disney World to support the Festival of Fantasy parade. After the successful launch, Conductor was rolled out at all the Disney parks including Disney California Adventure, Shanghai Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Tokyo Disneyland, making it the standard parade control system worldwide as of 2025.

The Main Street Electrical Parade, which had been on a 2-year hiatus during America on Parade, was then slated to return in a new version, and Don was appointed Music Director. While preparing the electronic arrangements and synth tracks for the new version, Don proposed a bold new idea. The original parade had begun with a manually triggered tape of an oscillator sweep, followed by a fade in of the continuous parade music as the lights were turned off in each area the parade approached. Don wanted to heighten the excitement of the parade's beginning by incorporating a fanfare that segued directly into the parade tempo. He also wanted to synchronize a dramatic "lights out" cue to the music. As the parade progressed through the park, this would require an inaudible transition from each new fanfare into the continuous track, in perfect synchronization. To accomplish this, Don invented a production and playback method called the Opening Window — which has been used to kick off virtually every Disney parade since.

Founded in 1978, Telarc Records was the first U.S. company to make commercial classical recordings in the digital format. In 1984, Telarc approached Don to create a "digital audio demonstration" track for one of their first compact disc releases. That track, titled Ascent, helped propel the CD Time Warp to notoriety in the digital audio world, as well as establish a 33-week #2 position on the Billboard Classical chart — the highest-ever position for a Telarc recording at the time. For another 20 weeks, Time Warp held the #4 position, and continued to remain in the top 30 for two full years.

Based on the phenomenal success of Ascent, Telarc asked Don if he had an idea for an entire CD of digital synthesizer work. Don proposed and delivered Bachbusters in 1986, which became Telarc's fastest-selling recording and first-ever Billboard chart-topper, holding the #1 Classical position for 14 weeks and staying in the top 30 for 78 weeks. Bachbusters and Time Warp finished 1986 as Billboard's overall #3 and #4 top classical CDs of the year, and 1987 as the #11 top classical CD of the year.

In 1988, Don released Beethoven or Bust, which zoomed up the charts again, reaching the #1 position (edging out "The Best of John Williams") in only six weeks and holding it for six months. Beethoven or Bust was Billboard's overall #2 Classical Crossover album of 1988, and remained in the top 30 for over eleven months. It was recorded, top to bottom, at home in Anaheim.

Full chart histories, reviewer comments, and a shelf of fan mail live on the discography page.

Following Don's work creating and directing nighttime spectaculars for Epcot, Don's company was engaged by Disneyland in 1985 to begin researching and creating a nighttime spectacular show for the Rivers of America and Tom Sawyer's Island area. This part of the park had the largest potential audience area for a show, but presented many technical challenges.

Because the sightlines from the audience to the stage would cover a 180-degree angle, special and magical effects had to be designed to withstand scrutiny and perform safely when viewed from all sides. To help fill the space between the audience and the stage, special watercraft and moving stages would have to be built, and a place made to store them. To enable set changes to take place on the stage, some sort of effect would be needed to distract the audience or create a "curtain."

Over the next five years, Don and his associates would consult with numerous specialists in the fields of magic, special effects, fountains, lasers, watercraft, multi-channel audio and projection. Plans and effects were developed, researched and tested. Presentations at all levels of Disney management were made. The commitment to a show of this scale was unprecedented, and it was not until 1990 that the final go-ahead for a massive river spectacular was given.

The focal point was an island that was open to the public during the day. A stage and backstage area had to be created that wouldn't exist during the day but could be made available quickly after nightfall. The audience would be across the river from the stage, so characters and props would need to be increased in visual scale to be effective. It was desirable to use the existing Mark Twain steamboat and Columbia sailing ship in the production, so these would also have to be changed over quickly from public day use to nighttime show use. When it was time to actually begin production, the river itself would have to be drained to provide access to the construction site. A cement bottom for the entire river was needed to stabilize the fountains and flame effects that would be permanently anchored there. There was much to figure out.

The final show features many innovative and landmark special effects, including film projection on water screens, setting the river surface on fire, multicolored lasers, custom pyrotechnics, a ten-channel audio system and a 30-foot-high fire-breathing dragon with a 20-foot wingspan. "Fantasmic!" debuted at Disneyland in May of 1992 and continues to be a major attendance draw for the park.

In early 1989, sound production for motion pictures was just beginning the transition to digital technology. Sound recordists would be sent out into the field to capture new recordings on portable analog tape machines. Sounds with wide dynamic range — loud impact transients but low average level, such as gunshots — were the most difficult to record, because the initial impact would saturate the magnetic tape (creating distortion) while the low-level trail-off would fall close to the tape noise floor. Sound producers were still leery of digital, which had acquired a reputation for sounding "thin" while big movies demanded big sound.

Sound effects designer and recordist Ken Johnson approached Don seeking a way to solve this digital recording dilemma: was it possible to capture gun sounds with both a "beefy" impact and the more subtle trail-off, without sinking into the noise floor? Don's previous experience in digital music production led him to believe it could be done. After a few weeks of experimentation, Don and Ken successfully perfected a method to capture the desired sound qualities, and they formed Sonic Boon® Digital Sound Effects to market the results.

The first library, consisting entirely of gun effects and taking its title from the idea of pairing digital recording with guns, was called Dynamic Range. Multiple shots from 22 different weapons were featured, recorded from both interior and exterior perspectives, along with silencer shots, bullet-impact sounds, ricochets, gun-handling foley, and custom-designed automatic weapon volleys.

Dynamic Range made its debut in Lethal Weapon II, followed quickly by Die Hard II, Hard to Kill, and Terminator II — then more movies and television: The Hunt for Red October, RoboCop II, Delta Force II, Halloween 5, B.L. Stryker, True Blue, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation. Rave reviews and endorsements came from top industry names including Richard Shorr, Alan Howarth, and Academy Award-winning sound designers Gary Rydstrom, Cecelia Hall, Alan Murray and Steven Flick. The library quickly set a new standard for "movie guns" and became the first all-digital sound effects resource for the audio production industry.

Don produced two more all-digital effects libraries with Ken — The Works (sounds of motion, action and force) and Blow Tools (wind and air movement effects) — before selling the company. Today, Sonic Boon sound effects continue to be an industry staple, available online through multiple distributors.

In mid-1997, Don approached Disney with plans for a nighttime spectacular on a scale befitting the world's first-ever global Millennium Celebration. Over the ensuing 26 months, Don led a production team of over 600 designers, engineers, programmers and construction workers to successfully deliver the show ahead of schedule and under budget.

One of Disney's requirements was that any show had to thematically outlive the Millennium so it could continue to run for several years after the initial celebration. The original goal was a five-year show life beginning October 1, 1999 — but as of September 30, 2019, "IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth" had completed a full 20 years of nightly operation, seen by over eight million park guests during its record-setting and award-winning run (eleven consecutive Golden Ticket Awards for Best Outdoor Night Production Show, 2005–2015, among them).

The original music score was composed by Gavin Greenaway and recorded at the famous Abbey Road Studios in London by members of the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras. The soundtrack was adopted by ABC Television for all of the Millennium celebration news and special coverage, resulting in an Emmy Award for Greenaway. Don provided original lyrics for the show's finale anthem, "We Go On" — later performed for one of the largest television audiences on Earth at the Super Bowl XXXIV halftime show.

The show began with two pyrotechnic meteors colliding over Epcot's World Showcase Lagoon, using special "air-launch" effects Don developed with Disney's Entertainment and R&D divisions. The effect initiates a dance of fire and pyrotechnics erupting from the lagoon surface via a special-effects barge — christened Don D's Inferno. Even though the closest park guests are over 500 feet away from the huge flames, they still react viscerally to the waves of heat generated as 200 gallons of propane is consumed by 37 custom-designed flame effects in less than 90 seconds. As a keyboardist, Don set up the barge to be played and programmed from a MIDI keyboard, which saved valuable production time.

And Don wasn't kidding about moving the Earth. As its centerpiece, Reflections of Earth features a rotating, 350,000-pound, 28-foot-diameter steel and LED Earth Globe — the world's first spherical video screen. The Earth Globe begins the show "offstage" and makes a grand entrance, traveling across the 42-acre lagoon through a field of floating pyrotechnic stars, also custom-developed for the show. The continent-shaped screens light up with imagery of natural wonders, familiar locations, famous landmarks and great human achievements. After relating the story of our home planet from its cosmic "birth" through the present day, the Earth Globe transforms and delivers a spectacular ending — 1,000 points of pyrotechnic light, bringing the total fireworks effects used in each performance to over 2,000.