King Tubby's school of engineers

Channel One mixing engineer of the mid-to-late 1970s, credited on Hoo Kim productions and remembered for the split dub-album rivalry 'Crucial Bunny vs Scientist'.

Dub moved the engineer from behind the glass to the front of the record. Riding faders, dropping instruments out and pushing reverb and delay in real time is playing, not editing, and once King Tubby demonstrated it the mixing desk became an instrument that could be soloed. It is one of the few genuinely new performance roles the twentieth century produced.

Jamaican reggae engineer-producer (1960-2014) counted among King Tubby's first Waterhouse trainees, later relocating to New York where he opened HC&F Studio in Freeport, Long Island, a required stop for visiting Jamaican artists across reggae and dancehall.

Organist, keyboardist and producer (1951-2012) who played in the Aggrovators and the Revolutionaries, arranged and engineered Channel One sessions, and produced Gregory Isaacs' Mr Isaacs and Dillinger's 'Cocaine in My Brain'.

Producer, singer and musician (1944-2019) known as 'the Rhythm Master', whose Pantomine label released dub and deejay classics and who was the first producer to credit King Tubby as an artist on record.

Jamaican mixing engineer long associated with Channel One and a prolific presence at the dancehall-era mixing desk, an example of the studio-engineer craft that shaped the sound of countless records while working largely behind the scenes.

The Freeport, Long Island studio Prince Philip Smart opened in 1982, named for father-in-law Herbert Chin and Family, which became a required stop for visiting Jamaican artists and a diaspora outpost of King Tubby's engineering lineage.

Scientist is the working name of Hopeton Overton Brown (born 1960), a Jamaican dub engineer who rose to prominence in the early 1980s. A protege of King Tubby, who gave him the nickname, he learned mixing at Tubby's studio before working at Channel One and Tuff Gong. He is celebrated for a run of themed dub albums such as Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981), recorded with the Roots Radics for producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes.

The Hoo Kim brothers' studio on Maxfield Avenue, opened in 1972, and the home of the rockers sound: Sly Dunbar's militant drumming with the Revolutionaries as house band drove a harder, four-square feel that displaced the one drop as the dominant rhythm of the mid-1970s. Channel One's recuts of Studio One rhythms were both tribute and commercial rivalry, and its output — with the Mighty Diamonds, the Wailing Souls, Junior Byles and others — defined the sound of roots reggae's peak years.

King Tubby's front-room studio at 18 Dromilly Avenue, Waterhouse, Kingston, where around 1971-72 he turned an ex-Dynamic MCI mixing desk (sourced via Bunny Lee) into the birthplace of dub, remixing producers' multitrack tapes into echo-and-reverb 'version' cuts. Primarily a mixing / dub-cutting room rather than a full tracking studio, staffed over the years by engineers Prince Jammy, Philip Smart and Scientist (David Katz, 'Solid Foundation'; FACT Magazine; Discogs 'King Tubby's Studio').

Lloyd James, the engineer and producer who came up under King Tubby in Waterhouse and then changed the music twice over. He built and ran his own sound before turning to production, and in 1985 issued "Under Mi Sleng Teng" — the Casio-preset rhythm that ended the live-band era and opened the digital one. Through the late 1980s his Waterhouse studio was the busiest room in Jamaica, cutting for Half Pint, Admiral Bailey, Chaka Demus, Ninjaman and most of the era's voices, and his Super Power sound carried the same material into the dance.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989.

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.

How a Waterhouse repairman turned a mixing desk into an instrument and became the uncredited composer of dub.

Behind U-Roy, Big Youth and Dennis Alcapone stood toasters whose records shaped the style but whose names rarely make the standard histories.