4-time Grammy winner Pablo Batista visits music students in Montco

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- In exactly one month, the Philadelphia Music Alliance will induct the 2026 class into its Walk of Fame.

The list of honorees includes world-renowned master percussionist Pablo Batista.

The four-time Grammy winner paid a very special visit to college students at Montgomery County Community College's Sound Recording and Music Technology program in Blue Bell on Monday, serving as a sort of pop-up professor and musical muse.

"For me, this means everything," says Batista. "This is part of my DNA, this is part of what I do."

The students have been preparing original music compositions since last year. On Monday, Batista became their musical mentor.

He's an internationally acclaimed master percussionist based in Philadelphia, and he's also an educator.

"To be able to bring it to the students here is really incredible because it's real life," Batista says. "These are the things they are going to experience when they get out there and get in those big studios."

Since he started his music career at just nine years old, Batista has decades worth of techniques to pass along.

On Monday, he added percussion to their tracks, without ever having listened to them before.

"I have 80 instruments back there," says Batista, "so we see what's going to work with the track, what's going to work with the vocals and how we are going to accentuate the different rhythms."

This was a rare masterclass for these students as they start to make their own mark in the industry.

"Having somebody with his name, his stature, his profile come in to record on our tracks, it's a blessing for us," says Dylan Perstag, a student in the program.

"We learned in 20 minutes what the rest of the people in the world would learn in years," adds student Baph MacIver.

Batista and several other prominent Philadelphia musicians will be inducted into the Philadelphia Music Alliance Walk of Fame in front of the Kimmel Center on Broad Street on Wednesday, May 13.