Downey mariachi students record inside professional studio

The shaking could easily have just been the ground keeping tempo, as Downey Unified School District’s Mariachi Diamanté program was in Los Angeles this week for a very special recording opportunity.

Members of the over two-year old mariachi music program traveled to Decibel Studios to record two songs in a professional recording studio setting. The experience was split over two days, lasting several hours each day.

Program founder and instructor Jorge Cardenas said that recording in the studio would help students “hear themselves in a new light and understand music through a new lens.”

“I would say it’s game changing. It’s something that can literally change the life of a student,” said Cardenas. “Music is one of those things where students will go through it and they might come out at the end saying ‘I don’t know if this is something that I’d like to do,’ because it’s a performance, sometimes it’s very, you know, it’s putting yourself out there.

“What people don’t realize is there’s other career paths within music that don’t necessarily involve that, in this case, in a recording studio being a mixing engineer, being a recording engineer, a mastering engineer, owning a business like this. Those are career paths that are not really talked about when it comes to music education, especially in public school.”

Jesus Martinez, owner of Decibel Studios, said that he had “no idea” what a recording studio was, nor what a mix engineer did until he reached the Berklee College of Music. Martinez donated the studio time to Downey’s students.

“When I opened this studio – it’s been about a year, year and a half or so – I had the idea to give back to the community and give the kids an experience that I never got at that age,” said Martinez.

Isabella Gonzalez, a 15-year-old sophomore at Warren High School, said that the experience was “something I’ve never been in.” In addition to playing the violin, Gonzalez also recorded some vocals.

“At first I was really nervous,” said Gonzalez. “Then I heard myself in the microphone, and I was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t that bad.’ Once you get used to it, I feel like it’s something that’s just easy.”

The two-year-old mariachi program is made up of students from across the district, from grades 6 through 12.

Mariachi Director Raul Guerrero says that the program is expecting “some pretty sizeable growth” coming in the first few weeks of school. He attributes some of that success to mariachi’s connection to many of his students’ backgrounds.

“Not every genre of music speaks to every person,” said Guerrero. “Right now, one of the biggest starting proponents of this has been the fact that this ties back to a lot of our students’ heritages, and maybe not their individual experiences and heritages, but their parents, their grandparents.

“A lot of this is growing those bonds, those connections with family and connecting to the past. Our students are growing in that way.”

Board of Education Vice President Linda Salomon Saldana said that the kids in the program “have really grown a lot in two years.”

“Downey Unified is just dedicated to giving these kids the best experience that they deserve, and bringing in cultural equity and experience like this with music that is culturally relevant to them, Downey Unified is all in,” said Saldana.