King Jammy

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

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

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

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.

A rhythm built in a Kingston studio in 1989 travelled to Panama, through New York, into San Juan, and became the pulse of the biggest Spanish-language pop music on earth. A Los Angeles court is now preparing to put the question of who owns it to a jury.

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.

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.

Sound systems, area dons and party colours — how PNP and JLP patronage shaped who played where, and who got their start.