Engineers as dub performers

Dub is what happens when the engineer stops being invisible. By dropping instruments out, drenching what remains in echo and sweeping a filter across the top, Jamaican engineers turned the mixing desk into an instrument played live to tape. The technique started as a B-side convenience and became a form that changed how records are made everywhere.

The accident on the B-side

Dub begins with a mistake that worked. The usual account credits Rudolph "Ruddy" Redwood, who ran the Supreme Ruler of Sound system in Spanish Town: cutting an acetate at Treasure Isle in 1967, the vocal track was left off the Paragons' "On the Beach", and rather than waste the disc he played it at his dance. The crowd sang the missing vocal themselves and would not let him move on. Duke Reid took the point, and instrumental "versions" began appearing on the backs of Jamaican singles as a matter of course.

That was an economy before it was an art form. A version cost a producer nothing — the rhythm was already paid for — and it gave the sound system's deejay somewhere to talk. But it also meant that by the end of the 1960s every Jamaican record had a second side where the arrangement was already dismantled, and someone was going to notice what could be done with the pieces.

The front room in Waterhouse

Osbourne Ruddock, known as King Tubby, repaired radios and televisions for a living and ran the Home Town Hi-Fi sound system. Both facts matter. The repair work gave him an understanding of circuits that no other engineer on the island had; the sound system gave him a room full of people every week to test the results on. He built his studio at 18 Dromilly Avenue in Waterhouse around a second-hand mixing board bought from Dynamic Sounds, which he then modified — most famously with a high-pass filter he could sweep by hand.

What Tubby did with it was performance rather than editing. There was no automation and no undo: the mix happened in real time, hands on the faders, dropping the bass out for four bars and slamming it back, throwing a single snare hit into a spring reverb so it cracked and rolled away, riding the tape delay until it fed back on itself. What reached the acetate was a take, with the mistakes of a take.

There was no undo. A dub mix is a performance, and what reached the acetate was a take.

The records make the case better than any description. King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, built from Augustus Pablo's productions and released in 1976, is the usual starting point, its title track a dub of Jacob Miller's "Baby I Love You So" in which the song is taken apart and the pieces are more affecting than the whole. Tubby was killed outside his home in February 1989, by which time nearly every engineer working in Jamaican music had either trained with him or copied him.

The other rooms

Tubby was not alone. Errol Thompson, who had engineered at Randy's Studio 17 before joining Joe Gibbs, formed with Gibbs the partnership billed as the Mighty Two, and their African Dub All-Mighty series ran through the late 1970s with a sharper, more mechanical wit — sirens, telephones and doorbells dropped into the mix. Sylvan Morris did the foundational engineering at Studio One and later at Harry J, and the sound of those rooms is his work as much as anyone's.

Lee "Scratch" Perry took the idea somewhere else entirely. At the Black Ark, the small studio he built behind his house in 1973, he worked on modest four-track equipment and got depth out of it by bouncing tracks down repeatedly until the tape itself became part of the sound. Super Ape, released in 1976, is less a set of dubs than a place — murky, crowded and unlike any room that has existed since.

The apprentices

Tubby taught, and his apprentices carried the method into the next decade. Hopeton Brown, working as Scientist, was mixing hit dub albums while barely out of his teens: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, released in 1981 over Roots Radics rhythms from Junjo Lawes's sessions, is playful where Tubby was severe, and its comic-book sleeves did as much as the music to fix dub's image abroad.

Lloyd James, first Prince and then King Jammy, was another Tubby apprentice, and it was in his studio that Wayne Smith's "Under Mi Sleng Teng" was built from a Casio preset in 1985, opening dancehall's digital era. Philip Smart took the training to New York and ran HC&F on Long Island for decades. The lineage is unusually traceable because it was an apprenticeship in the old sense — you stood in the room and watched the hands.

What the desk did next

Dub's central proposition — that a finished record is raw material, and the mix is where the authorship is — turned out to travel further than the records did. It shaped the British studios of Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound and Mad Professor's Ariwa, and its assumptions are now ordinary in remix culture, in hip-hop production and in electronic music generally. The engineer stepped out from behind the glass in Waterhouse, and never really went back.