Jim Reitzel is St. Hilary's Creative Tech Director, leading the team behind what you see and hear at a weekend Mass — the screens, the sound, the livestream that carries the Saturday vigil and three of the Sunday Masses to whoever cannot be in the room, and the weekly run of slides that turns the homily into something a congregation can follow. Alongside the parish he keeps a recording career: he is Narada Michael Walden's engineer at Tarpan Studios in San Rafael, and by one recent public account he has held that chair for more than thirty years. His credits reach a long way past Marin. He is among the engineers credited on Buddy Guy's “Living Proof”, the album that took the 2011 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album, and he is credited as engineer and mixer on “Santana IV”; he also engineered and mastered “The Quarantine Blues” at Tarpan, a track cut remotely during the shutdown of live music that brought John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Cindy Blackman Santana and Ralphe Armstrong together. When Walden described the floating version of one of his own songs in an interview published in July 2026, the explanation was simple: it was created by his engineer, Jim Reitzel, who had been working on taking away all the rhythm and leaving just the keyboards and the voice. He teaches the craft as well as practising it — for Marin Academy, his old school, he has run a week-long recording course in a San Rafael studio where students work his own 24-track, take turns as producer, engineer, arranger and musician, and go home with a tape of what they recorded.