King Jammy

How a preset rhythm on a consumer keyboard turned Jamaica's oldest studio economy into the digital age.

How a cheap keyboard preset in 1985 reset the sound of dancehall.

The electronics craft as an apprenticeship, and its journey from Waterhouse to London and New York.

In the studios of 1970s Kingston, engineers learned to dismantle a finished song and rebuild it as something stranger, launching the version, the remix and the idea of the producer as author.

One harmony group's lead-singer chair changed hands more than almost any other in reggae, and each singer carried it somewhere new.

At Waterhouse and Maxfield Avenue, the mixing engineer stopped being a technician and became an author.

When King Jammy's went digital in 1985, a wave of deejays rode the new Waterhouse computer sound into the dancehall mainstream.

The digital riddim turned the producer into the star of the record - and the story runs from a Casio preset to the modern hit factory.

In Jamaica the mixing desk became an instrument, and the men behind it — King Tubby, Errol Thompson, Scientist, Lee Perry — became performers in their own right.