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 'Striker'" Lee (1941-2020) was one of Jamaica's most prolific reggae producers, active from the late 1960s through the 1980s. Starting as a record plugger for Duke Reid and Leslie Kong, he scored his first hit with Roy Shirley's "Music Field" (1967) and went on to record hundreds of tracks with his session band the Aggrovators, popularising the "flying cymbals" (flyers) hi-hat sound. A key early collaborator of King Tubby, Lee was central to the birth of dub and helped open the UK market via Trojan; he was awarded the Order of Distinction in 2008.

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.

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.

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

The carpenters and engineers who built the sound get little of the credit the record labels keep.

How the B-side and the mixing desk became instruments.

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.