“King Tubby was the first to use to use the mixing console as an instrument in dub, the engineer becomes the composer, the arranger, the performer and the artist. “Tubby’s family got scared after he died and from my personal reasoning with his daughter, none of them wanted to continue on in music, including his brother in Miami who is also a technician,” says Scientist, who apprenticed with King Tubby as a teenager. Like his royal mentor, he graduated from gifted electronics technician to renowned dub mixer. Dancehall, dubstep, drum and bass and hip-hop all owe a debt to Tubby’s experimentation.īillboard's 10 Best Reggae Albums of 2016: Critic's Picksįollowing his death, Tubby’s family turned away from the music industry. Producers brought Tubby their master tapes and his fearless audio testing - stripping off instruments from a recording, phasing others to the background, adding echo and reverb - not only expanded dub’s possibilities but was the genesis of the remix, ever present in contemporary production. Tubby fixed TVs, radios and various appliances at his home, but he also built and maintained speakers and amplifiers for many sound systems. However, it was the brilliant electronics technician turned visionary music engineer King Tubby (born Osborne Ruddick, January 28, 1941) who originally elevated dubbing into a renowned art form. In 1971, what is widely regarded as the very first dub single appeared: The Hippy Boys’ “Voo Doo” - the “version” to singer Little Roy’s “Hard Fighter,” mixed by Lynford Anderson. The “versions” (instrumentals) provided room for producers and engineers to add further instrumentation and deejays to toast their lyrics (Jamaican deejays are precursors of rappers deejays initially chatted their lyrics over instrumental breaks on rhythms played by sound system selectors). The city’s competitive sound system landscape had evolved: no longer did playing exclusive singles yield a sound’s superiority - dominance was now achieved through the multiple versions of a hit song within a sound system operator’s musical arsenal. Therefore a sound man would typically order several copies of the same record from the label/studio, each with a different mix. When digital reggae came to the fore in the mid-1980s, dub’s popularity diminished in Jamaica currently, dub is enjoying a renaissance on the island and beyond its shores, whether it’s live dubbing performances in clubs and at music festivals or the rediscovery of classic dub albums by the genre’s forefathers including Scratch, Pablo, Hopeton “Scientist” Brown, Neil “Mad Professor” Fraser, and the man widely credited as dub’s originator, the late Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock.ĭub evolved from the instrumental versions that Kingston producers started issuing circa 1969 as B-sides to vocal releases.
“For example King Jammy tours the world doing live mixes of his own productions because he produced the song, he has each instrument recorded separately so he can get more detailed in his mixes I take the actual recorded material as played on a CD, 7-inch or album track and do what mixes I can, so I do dub mixes as if on a sound system, he does mixes as if in the studio.” “There are different approaches to dubbing,” continues Gabre, who operates the Rockers Sound Station started by his mentor, the late producer/musician Augustus Pablo, another pivotal figure in dub’s development. Meet the Producers Who Brought Dancehall Back to the Charts In 2016
We turn on the bass, turn up the knobs, keeping the craft a little more intricate,” comments Gabre Selassie, whose thoughtfully curated playlist of traditional Rastafarian Nyabinghi chants, classic Jamaican tracks, contemporary roots reggae and powerful dub mixes is heard each Sunday evening at the Kingston Dub Club, located in the hills overlooking the capital city. “Dubbing is a traditional Jamaican sound system vibe if you go to a dancehall sound system they take out the bass and drop it in as an artist is performing, but they are not dubbing as we would do it. Alongside other visionaries who conducted experiments in their respective studios and on the sound systems that played the music, they created dub, which rose to prominence in Jamaica and internationally during the 1970s. Scratch’s experimentation at the mixing board, particularly at his fabled Black Ark studio in the ’70s, established him as one of the most creative forces in dub. Dub refers to rearranging elements within an existing recording through the isolation of individual instrumental tracks with the addition of various effects to create a new work.
The event, part of the inaugural Tmrw.Tday Festival, was called The Dub Cave, nodding to the musical art form Perry helped define.
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