Vicar Andres Valencia (St. Paul-Mt. Prospect, IL) and Karla Gonzalez (YLM) recording the Spanish and English radio segments

A 2019-2020 LWML grant to the Adelante! Ministry of Ysleta Lutheran Mission Human Care (YLM) made it possible to renovate what used to be the main office building and is now referred to as the Music Building. The three offices became a music classroom, a piano lab, and a recording studio.

The needed work to make this happen was done throughout 2020. In 2021, Mariachi San Pablo re-started socially distanced rehearsals, while plans for future recordings were being fleshed out. However, the recording studio hasn’t been idle; thanks to it being fully equipped, it has been used to pre-record several of the KELP radio segments. Guest speakers have been able to join Pastor Heimer at the radio station to record live, but for those who can’t, pre-recording has taken place in the fully equipped Adelante! recording room.

Rev. Stephen Heimer cues the rhythm section as they record their tracks

Middle of January of this year, Mariachi San Pablo began to meet at the YLM campus, rehearsing new music, arrangements of familiar hymns, and then finishing off their time together in the recording room. For those who don’t know much about the recording of a music CD, each component has to be recorded individually. For the month of March, the rhythm tracks of the arranged hymns, liturgy, and other parts of this new CD were completed. This meant the guitar, vihuela, and guitarron players met to play the same songs, individually and together.

The next set of recordings will be the violins, followed by the trumpet, then ending with the voices. Once all the individual components are completed, the work of mixing down the tracks will take place.

This Mariachi San Pablo CD will be very different from the last four they’ve released. The purpose of this worship CD is to be a resource for churches that need guidance in their liturgy and music, or for those churches who don’t have any musicians or music leaders. It is meant to be instrumental as well as vocal.

Several arrangements of hymns will be included, and when asked which hymns can be expected, Miguel Muñoz, director of Mariachi San Pablo, smiled and replied, “You’ll just have to wait with everyone else.”

The goal is to complete this worship CD by June, making it available to churches and individuals everywhere soon after.