Danny Hutton, founding member of the '70s supergroup Three Dog Night, is happy to have graduated from stadiums to symphony halls.

The band, which was founded by Mr. Hutton, Cory Wells and Chuck Negron in the late 1960s, was a perennial chart-topper during the early 1970s. Hits such as One , Joy to the World and Shambala made the band one of the first acts to routinely book stadium tours.

Later, the band's journey would be marked by excess, bad breakups and waning interest in its tight vocal harmonies and interpretations of other artists' songs. Still, Three Dog Night has managed to thrive and survive, no longer playing the stadiums they once filled but performing with much bigger backing bands.

Three Dog Night appears tonight with the Augusta Symphony in a pops concert at Bell Auditorium.

"I think of it as having a big ocean liner behind us," Mr. Hutton said of the symphony gigs in a recent telephone interview from his California home. "You can't ad lib. You can't forget where you are in a song. You have to stay focused. If you don't, that big boat will run you down."

Mr. Hutton said the symphony performances are an extension of Three Dog Night's long-standing approach to arrangement and recording. He said arrangements and assessing ways they could make the limited instrumentation of a rock band sound larger were always of paramount concern.

"It really is something we did from the start," he said. "It was always important to me, important to us -- to get that certain sound. In those days, of course, you had to go to certain lengths.

''We would run guitars through organ amplifiers, record in bathrooms -- whatever it took."

When it came to playing with symphonies, Mr. Hutton said preparation meant calling in a different sort of musician, Larry Baird. He conducts all of Three Dog Night's symphony performances and arranges the charts for the band. Mr. Hutton said when they began the process, he offered only the barest of instruction.

"I told him I wanted it to sound like Gershwin and Gustav Holst," he said with a laugh. "He gave it to us."

Mr. Hutton, who spent considerable time with Beach Boys maestro Brian Wilson during the legendary Pet Sounds sessions, said the lessons he learned from Mr. Wilson continue to inform Three Dog Night's approach to arrangement.

"That was like college," he said. "And what it comes down to is the songs. We have good songs. Songs with great emotion and great harmonies. That's something that doesn't have an expiration date."