The mixing desk became an instrument
In a small room in Waterhouse, King Tubby stopped using a mixing desk to balance records and started using it to play them. Everything we call dub comes out of that decision.
King Tubby
Engineer and sound system operator
- Waterhouse, Kingston, Jamaica
- 1960s to 1989
Osbourne Ruddock, known everywhere as King Tubby, was an electronics repairman who built his own sound system and then rebuilt the record itself. From a small room at 18 Dromilly Avenue in Waterhouse, Kingston, he took finished rhythm tracks and pulled them apart at the mixing desk: dropping the vocal, punching the drum through, sending the snare out into a long tail of spring reverb and delay.
His sound, Tubby’s Home Town Hi-Fi, gave him a live audience for the experiment. What worked in the dance got cut to a dubplate, and what worked on dubplate became the template for an entire form of music. The mixing desk stopped being a place where a record was tidied up and became the place where it was played.
Tubby was shot and killed outside his home in 1989. Almost every dub record made since owes something to the way he heard a rhythm track.
Go and listen
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On Natty Dub
Version excursion
The instrumental on the back of the single started as a way to save money. It ended up producing an entire way of making music, and eventually most of modern pop production.
Ten records to start with
Not the ten best, and not the ten rarest. Ten that will teach you the most about how roots and dub work, in an order that makes sense.
Sleng Teng and the day the music went digital
In 1985 a preset rhythm from a cheap Casio keyboard went to number one in Jamaica and took the whole industry with it. Forty years on, people are still arguing about what was lost.
U-Roy and the birth of the deejay
Somebody talking over a record was not a new idea. Doing it so well that the talking became the record was, and one man on King Tubby's sound worked out how.
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
The record people hand you when you ask what dub is. Fifty years on it is still the right answer, and still stranger than its reputation suggests.