King Tubby's soldering iron: the engineer as author

The hand-modified mixing desk at the heart of King Tubby's Dromilly Avenue studio, built up from an obsolete MCI console acquired from Dynamic Sounds around 1971 and rewired with home-built filters and effects sends that let Tubby 'play' the desk as an instrument.

The high-pass filter on King Tubby's mixing board, famously swept live to strip bass out of a mix and slam it back in, becoming one of dub's signature dramatic gestures and an example of studio electronics used as a performance control.

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.

The radio and electrical repair operation King Tubby ran in Waterhouse, winding transformers and building amplifiers for local sound systems, the electronics workshop out of which his celebrated dub studio grew.

Michael Veal's award-winning 2007 study of dub, which details how engineers like King Tubby turned studio electronics into instruments of composition and treats the engineer as a creative author of the music.

The hand craft of winding audio transformer coils, learned in radio repair and practised by King Tubby and his apprentices to expand bass and tailor an amplifier's tone; an apprenticeship task at the heart of the electronics trade.

Edward O'Sullivan "Bunny" Lee (23 August 1941 - 6 October 2020), from Greenwich Farm in Kingston, began in 1962 as a record plugger for Duke Reid's Treasure Isle and then for Leslie Kong — the job of getting other people's records played — before moving into production himself. His first hit was Roy Shirley's "Music Field" in 1967, and his own Lee's label followed. What made him matter was volume and openness: through the 1970s he produced Slim Smith, Max Romeo, Delroy Wilson, Eric Donaldson, John Holt and Johnny Clarke, and worked with very nearly every deejay of the era, U-Roy, Dennis Alcapone and I-Roy among them. With his session band the Aggrovators and drummer Carlton "Santa" Davis he built the flying cymbal sound that ran through the middle of the decade. He was also, crucially, one of the producers who let King Tubby experiment: their early-1970s sessions pulling rhythms apart and putting distorted vocals and effects back over them are part of how dub came to exist at all. He was made an Officer of the Order of Distinction in 2008 and died of heart failure at 79.

The idea that the electronics builder and studio technician, though rarely credited on a record, is a genuine author of its sound, shaping tone through the amplifiers, transformers and effects they design and maintain.

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. Per the engineer and broadcaster Mikey Dread, who apprenticed under him, Tubby built his first echo unit himself from two old tape recorders and constructed custom pressure-sensitive, spring-loaded switches for triggering sound effects, so that striking them harder or softer varied the result. Dread also credited a Tubby-built high-pass filter, applied to the snare and hi-hat, with producing the splashy "flying cymbal" sound heard on Bunny Lee and Johnnie Clarke productions such as "No Man Can Escape His Judgement" and "Jah Jah in Deh in Deh".

The Byron Lee-owned studio and pressing complex on Bell Road, Kingston, built out of the old West Indies Records Limited plant. Dynamic combined a large well-equipped room with its own pressing capacity, which made it the place both Jamaican productions and visiting international acts used through the 1970s — the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon and Eric Clapton among them — alongside a steady stream of local reggae sessions.