Dub is remixing a song before the word became common currency. A Dub track takes an original piece of music and rearranges, manipulates and/or removes parts of the arrangement to create a new piece of music. It is a difficult music to break into for a rock or indie fan as it stands opposed to many of the “rules” of pop music. It strips away most of the melody of a song, removing the most direct human element, the vocal. It breaks down the music into textures and aims to disorientate and confuse with abrupt changes of atmosphere. It throws in sound effects in a completely abstract fashion, flushing toilets, children crying or bursts of thunder and lighting. The effects don’t tell a story or illustrate a lyric, they are just there for the novelty of the moment.
It is temperamental music unsuited to modern listening habits. Hearing Dub on an mp3 from a computer speaker will never convince you of Dub’s merits. Only when heard through a huge 5 foot bass cabinet at maximum volume do it's true dimensions reveal themselves. While a rock fan will go to a concert to feel their favourite tracks transformed into a physical experience, dub’s very essence is the altering of the human body with sound waves. The music on a disk is really half the experience, a pleasant bass driven groove on a turn table can transform into a molecularly changing wall of vibrations at a good Reggae sound clash, changing your body’s place in the environment in an often unsettling way. The music and the means of transmitting it have a symbiotic relationship unlike any other kind of recorded music.
I like Dub because it stands against so many of the holy rules of rock and roll. While albums certainly sold on the strength of the most well known engineers, it’s finest practitioners were almost anonymous as personalities, a dub was judged purely on it’s ability to rock a crowd. A Dub album was often credited to whoever was the hottest engineer at the time, irrelevant of who actually mixed it (I several many albums sharing the same mixes under different titles with different credits). A King Tubby mix often simply meant a mix created at his studio and was just as likely to have been mixed by one of his apprentices like Scientist or Philip Smart, while the boss attended to his TV & radio repair shop. Dub was functional music par excellence, a rhythm track of a popular song could be versioned (the process of creating a dub mix) hundreds of times, hundreds of variations on a theme. Musicians were rarely credited or were simply lumped together as generic studio bands such as The Aggrovators or The Revolutionaries.
Dub was a commercial phenomenon created by an industry hungry to sell records and promote events. With the advent of the dub mix you could now sell the same record several times over and it provided a handy filler for the B-side of a single without having to write a new original tune. These days dub music is a marginal branch of experimental electronic music with geeky egg head fans but it was originally made as dance music for hard working men and woman who just wanted to have a good night out. The intentions of Dub are a long way from the avant garde, despite using revolutionary techniques that have influenced everything from hip hop, jungle, techno and trip hop. If a dub fails to make you nod your head and feel good it has failed, it maybe good music but it is not Dub. Until the advert of genres such as Jungle and Breakbeat Techno there was no other music, with the exception of some of the more experimental Beatles productions, which combined such cutting edge techniques with the ability to be enjoyed by a music fan on a night out as a piece of pop music and not as an “artistic statement”.
Dub is electronic music first and foremost, despite the musicians playing the rhythms (pre digital dub), it is music unimaginable without electricity. While anyone can strum a Bob Marley song on an acoustic guitar Dub utterly rejects the notion that pop music is reducible to a set of chords that can be played on acoustic instrument. It also inverts the rock music notion of rhythm supporting harmony, not content with flipping this equation but doing away with the melody almost altogether. In dub the production is the track, the grooves almost grotesquely enhanced in the mix like a steroid bound weight lifter. The same patterns played on an acoustic bass with a kit stripped of reverb and delay would mean nothing, an almost irrelevant squiggle on staff paper. Many a pedestrian song has been reinvented into a brilliant piece of music through the combination of electricity and the genius of a Lee “Scratch” Perry or a Scientist.
One particularly interesting element of Dub is how a relatively simple music completely changed the idea of what music actually is and how we understand and record it. While the average reggae song is 1 or 2 basic chords with a steady medium to slow tempo, with an emphasis on complimentary instrumental parts (with none of the showy soloing of rock music) many elements of a Dub track are not transcribable by conventional Western notation or easily understood by the average rock musician. I can write a figure for a bassist to play but his method of amplification, his instrument, how he strikes the strings and his sense of timing and space are as important to realising this piece of music as the notes themselves. Many fine rock players are incapable of playing a simple Dub bass line with any empathy. The amazing feel of so many great reggae tracks was helped by the familiarity of the tunes to the musicians. The same song may have been recorded many times by the same pool of players for different acts over the years, helping them develop a telepathic connection and effortless syncopation.
Dub effects like reverb or delay twist the instruments into sounds beyond notation, many dub tracks speed up and slow down and feature varispeed applied to vocals and instrumental parts. Use of analogue effects and tape to record create strange shifts in the keys of the melodic elements, eery harmonics lurk under sweet melodies. A production like Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Heart of the Congos (one of the greatest albums in any genre) or Super Ape can sound frighteningly murky and dissonant under the vocals is supports. Tracks endlessly bounced down on 2 or 4 tracks created dense soundscapes where distortion and the ghostly sounds of partially erased overdubs add to the sonic overload. The “hook” of a song could now be a textural rather than melodic part.
The roar of spring reverb used to create the distinctive “thunder” effect of King Tubby’s Poor Marcus Dub overwhelms everything in it’s path, even Johnny Clarke’s beautiful melody. The snide joke of the crying child running through out Lee Perry’s People Funny Boy (about a music producer he disliked) makes the song. Another innovation from Dub was the early use of what would be know as sampling, People Funny Boy being one of the first commercially released examples. Due to the simplicity of the chord changes Lee Perry would keep huge reels of tape featuring his favourite rhythms at the ready and dump A cappellas of different vocal melodies on top to create brand new songs or to spice up a dub mix. This practical approach to music has parallels in the multiple versions of songs issued by Motown, whoever had the hit became the definitive version but there are many excellent versions of classics such as “My Guy/My Girl”. Again this is an anathema to the post Beatles idea of the rock artist as auteur, singing and writing their own music and often having a hand in production. A Dub classic is the result of an army of worker ants each playing a part in it’s history. While rock music enshrines a classic song in stone, open to rerecording but always judged against the original, Dub offered that a track was in a constant state of evolution, it's very malleability to improvement and variation being part of it’s strength.
A popular album format was the one rhythm LP which contained ten different versions of the same groove with vocals, dubs and re-edits fighting for space. Classic rhythms are as big a part of reggae as the actual songs themselves. Sampling was not just limited to vocals, albums like African Dub All-Mighty Chapter 3 feature every day sounds scattered over the grooves to keep the listener interested including a flushing toilet and ringing telephones. As the dub market place became more and more crowded producers enhanced the novelty elements losing some of the beautiful subtly of the early dubs. While it is the drama of the crashing reverb storms and chasms of delay that first get your attention the beauty of the very best Dub tracks are the parts you hear on re-listening. Often it is during a breakdown in the middle of a tune where the engineer adds his little details like a painter. Tubby would blend in small amounts of flange to his hats giving a sense of endless momentum. A short metallic reverb would make a snare sound like a gun shot while a vast tail would make the cymbals sound like waves on a beach. The best engineers were in complete control of their effects, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of timing delays and reverb tails. Each dub is a master class in dynamics and space. While many recording “mistakes” in a mix were down to the limitations of the equipment used, (Jamaican studios like Studio One featured brilliant engineers and beautifully recorded instruments) producers like Lee Perry and Keith Hudson were happy to experiment and leave odd effects or “errors” in their mixes if the vibe was right. Their music is a great deal more "home made" than King Tubby's. If you are a producer with a sense of a “correctly” mixed song, their Dub is not for you.
Dub is a take it or leave it musical form, while it responded to an enthusiastic audience and naturally competed for the greatest novelty and extremity in it’s mixes for commercial reasons, ultimately it stayed true to it’s key components. Like blues it may take flights into outer space, like the space blues of Jimi Hendrix, but the bedrock stays the same. In fact dub successfully translated so many extremely experimental techniques far and wide because it never forgot that these effects were there to sell the almighty electrical groove. The same thought process has influenced all subsequent dance based music. House, Techno and Drum & Bass all feature techniques born out of the “can do” attitude of the Dub innovators. By the standards of a modern recording studio the average Jamaican producer of the 70’s worked with a meagre set up. However the limitations of the technology inspired a level of innovation which only a few other producers in the world were matching. It is often said that the Beatles used the studio as an instrument and there were few better “players” in the world than King Tubby. Osbourne Ruddock, before he became royalty, combined his love of electrical engineering with music to set up the most massive sound system anyone had ever seen. Sound clashes were a popular event where by two competing sound systems, took turns blasting out the latest hits at deafening volume. Ruddock with his electrical know how soon became “King” as his massive custom build bass speakers reduced rivals to jelly and made his system the biggest on the island. The origins of the first dub pressings are vague with many people claiming credit for it’s invention but it is generally agreed that instrumental versions of popular hits were created for sound systems to allow the new phenomenon of DJs to chat over the top. It is often said that sound system operator Rudolph "Ruddy" Redwood went to get a tune pressed up and the engineer accidentally left the vocal off, he liked the effect and played it out that night.
DJ's at the time were simply charismatic masters of ceremonies who boasted about how amazing they and the sound system were and denigrated rival systems, a style know as “toasting” and a fore runner of rap music. DJs like U-Roy, Dennis Alcapone, I-Roy and Big Youth would get the crowd hyped up before the next tune would play but soon integrated their verses into the music itself. At first they would simple use instrumental songs to speak over (for instance a song by The Skatalites) before stepping back when a vocal tune was cued up, however in the furious competition between systems DJ started demanding exclusive instrumental mixes of songs. Their selector would sometimes have several copies of the same song but in different versions and flip between them to build tension before playing the hit version, all the while accompanied by the toasting. Big systems like Tubby’s had the money and influence to demand fresh exclusives from the top producers thus making their parties more desirable to the crowds and a great way for labels to promote up coming tracks.
It is important to understand that a dub of a track is different from an instrumental reggae song. Artists like the The Skatalites would write great original songs with a trombone playing the melody as if it were the vocalist. Apart from have no vocals they were a specific song with hooks and complementary parts played to support the melody. At first engineers would either play these tunes at sound systems or strip off the lead instrument for an exclusive mix that allowed more space for the DJ to speak over. Some early dub albums created at Studio One feel much more like songs but with the vocals surgically removed. It is great to hear the fantastic musicianship underneath the hits laid bare but there is none of the outrageous effects applied to later dubs and no real sense of transformation. Due to his sound system experience King Tubby recognised that the more your stripped a track down the more space you had to fill the mix with BASS.
Not satisfied with the mixes he was being given Tubby purchased an old mixing console which he tweaked to perfection using his electrical skills. He did not as often stated build the desk and it was in fact a 12 track desk going into 4 subgroups going into 4 tape channels rather than a 4 track desk. (There is a slightly embarrassing "noble savage" attitude to reggae producers from the Western press, yes they had limited budgets and resources but these guys knew what they were doing and when they had the money they purchased the most state of the art equipment, hence the rise of digital Reggae in the 80's). This gave him much more flexibility than his rivals using 2 or 4 tracks and his notorious perfectionism, cleanliness and attention to detail meant it was the best maintained studio in Jamaica. He replaced the original faders for ones with a smooth glide for greater control and started pushing the desk to it’s limits, cranking the famous “big nob”, a hi pass filter, normally used for sedate tweaking of unwanted bass rumble to create disorientating frequency sweeps on the guitar or hats. He also customised a spring reverb unit and took to smashing it with his hand to create quite frightening splashes and roars on the snare and cymbals. These new “dubs” could then be manipulated even further when played at the sound system, working the crowd into a frenzy as the DJ goaded them on. While instrumental reggae has all the instruments playing more or less all the way through a song in a conventional supportive role Tubby would strip a tune to just the bass and drums, the bass outrageously high in the mix and the drums shimmering with reverb and then cut in and out elements of the original instrumentation, a snatch of guitar here and blast of organ there as the mood took him, to emphasise certain parts of the arrangement in surprising ways.
Everything was subservient to the bass. While the bass was generally prominent in Ska and Reggae, in 50’s and 60’s rock and pop music it was almost an after thought, poorly recorded and under mixed with the focus of a tune being on the melodic parts of a mix. A dub track of the time would have sounded like it was from outer space being far more bass intensive than even the most groove driven soul and funk of the time. Listen to 60’s and 70’s Sly and the Family Stone tracks, Larry Graham’s bass lines are a muffled presence while many of Bootsy Collins’s famous lines for James Brown’s band are also poorly defined in the mix. Dub made the bass the most prominent part of a mix, in effect taking the place of the vocal, manipulating the low frequencies so that when played through sound system bass speakers it would take on earth quake proportions. Listening to Little Richard scream on record today still sounds rebellious and thrilling, imagine how it sounded in the 50's? The same can be said about the sledge hammer power of Dub bass, it is still an awesome sound but in the 70's it was a sound akin to Godzilla destroying Tokyo.
As the bass chugged through the song Tubby would also suddenly throw another instrumental part through a delay unit, creating the most instantly identifiable effect on a Dub track. Snare hits or guitar chords would spring up and out of a mix, echoing out over a break in the groove like a cartoon character running in thin air over a cliff edge before the almighty bass thudded back in. Dub was as much about dismantling music as making it. Spontaneous composition by removal of musical parts. Many of the techniques and aesthetics discuss had been explore by classical composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage before but their music was an academic exercise, it was certainly not pop music which the every day music fan wanted to listen to. But using similar innovative techniques dub cuts became hugely popular, it is hard to think of a more experimental style of music being so appealing, and the more engineers pushed the boundaries the more people loved it. Later producers like Adrian Sherwood and DJ Spooky made the connection between “art” music and deep dub explicit in their own mixes, bringing in modern classical, jazz, post punk and rap influences into their mixes.
Soon people started asking for “King Tubby” mixes and for the first time in history the engineer’s name was featured on a record label as the featured artist and selling point. There had been star producers in the past like Phil Spector, but the lowly engineer was seen as a geek in a white lab coat. Of course engineers were never big personalties like the super star toasters Big Youth and I-Roy but their name became a stamp of quality on record, part of the chain of invention and reinvention a song was now going through as it was composed, covered, versioned and re-versioned to oblivion. Soon Tubby was so busy, he still kept up his electrical repair shop while creating mixes, he started employing apprentices. He taught his skills to Scientist and Prince Jammy, amongst others, who soon started to outstrip the master himself. After a certain point a “King Tubby” track is just as likely to have be mixed by Scientist and Jammy as by Tubby but the original techniques are his. Scientist in particular brought an improvisatory element to a mix, in the same way a jazz musician knows his instrument and his theory so well he can completely reinvent a humdrum chord sequence, Scientist knew the mixing desk, his effects and the material so well he could create a dub in a single pass. Riding the faders and knobs like a painter he would put the latest hits through the mincer, turning simple love tunes into psychedelic opuses. Alongside the hippy rock movement driven by the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide, Dub also sought out ways to enhance the effects of marijuana, tailoring the frequencies and effects to provide the most brain melting experience for the smokers in the audience. These mixes were made in the days of tape when if you made an error you had to start again, with limited budgets and tight deadlines the greatest Dub engineers combined creativity with the ability to get the job done and not waste precious studio time.
Scientist and Jammy ushered in the era of dub overload as every tune had a dubbed out B-side and the market was flooded with dub LPs. The shear number of dub tracks and the variable marketing of these tracks can be intimidating to someone wanting to get into it. Tracks are often mislabeled and misattributed on budget compilations and with 10 or more dubs of a single rhythm things started to get over crowded. The simplicity of the average reggae song in both composition and structure meant a virtuoso mix engineer like Prince jammy could spend a day knocking out dubs, some more inspired than others and producers like Striker Lee demanded hundreds of tracks on the market to keep the demand satisfied. Again this is something off putting to a rock fan, Dub and Reggae were pop music, created to satisfy music fans, while the best tracks are amazing works of art they were not created with a sense of self importance or significance. While later hard core Roots music, personified in the mainstream by Bob Marley started writing political songs and presenting themselves as a self contained “band”, the heart of Jamaican music has always been a machine of self sustaining and regenerating pop music, churned out to make money, by teams of producers, songwriters and musicians. It is this contrast that makes dub so interesting, it says that just because something is mass market and manufactured it does not have to be bland, safe or insulting to your intelligence. Something modern producers should take note of.
Dub was effectively killed off by over saturation and the advent of digital reggae aka Dancehall. Dancehall brought things full circle by returning the music to short catchy songs about dancing and sex with a new side order of rap influenced gun play and ghetto violence. While Jammy kept producing interesting digital dub for a while, fundamentally the new digital effects and rhythms did not suit the dub format terribly well. Reggae moved more towards being a West Indian rap losing some of it’s experimental edge with the focus moving from the rhythms to the new gruff DJ styles of Buju Banton. In the later part of the 70’s and early 80’s the flame was kept alive in the UK which became a fertile place for the next wave of Dub and Reggae. As first and second generation children of immigrants from the Caribbean started making their own music which along with the originals from Jamaica was unexpectedly embraced by Punk and New Wave musicians. The most significant figures to keep Dub going, in a direct line from the original music, were key UK figures like Adrian Sherwood, Jah Shaka, Dennis Bovell and Mad Professor (who proved completely digital dub could work in the right hands and took dub main stream with his work on Massive Attack and Primal Scream albums). Many of them learned their trade from the originals, Sherwood being mentored by Prince Far I and Mad Professor working with Lee Perry. Dennis Bovell in particular worked his magic with both Reggae poet Linton Kwesi Johnson and post punk artists like The Slits and The Pop Group bringing Dub production techniques explicitly into a rock context. Labels like Sherwood’s On-U Sound (on a more underground level) and Island and Virgin (in the mainstream) kept up the UK’s interest in Jamaican music with both new artists and reissues of classic albums. The Sex Pistols John Lydon even worked as a talent scout for Virgin, visiting the island, hanging out with Big Youth and taking what he heard into his work with Public Image Ltd who combined grating post punk guitar with the heaviest deepest bass lines ever heard on a nominally “rock” record. A major fan of the music Lydon played Reggae on radio shows and passed on recommendations to fans of his favourite Dub and Reggae artists. His work with Leftfield made the Dub/Punk/Dance lineage explicit to mainstream fans while artists like Massive Attack had whole albums released as Dub versions.
During the 80‘s and early 90‘s dub had built up a cult following amongst European dance producers, who started obsessively mining the vast catalogue of already issued Dub records. While Dub itself never had a full scale revival commercially many of it’s characteristics influenced the remix culture of House and Techno and had a profound effect on genres like Jungle and Drum & Bass. There are also many revivalists who produce dub for dub’s sake, removed from the original “remix” culture of original Dub tracks, and building a track from the ground up without it first having been based on a pop song. Some of the heaviest dub now comes from Spain and Germany!
Dub also provided a key inspiration to Dubstep. While the amount of "Dub" in a Dubstep tune varies from producer to producer early exponents like Digital Mystikz basically produced digital Dub like Mad Professor but stripped their tunes even further down to the basics of bass and drums with minimal effects interrupting the booming sub. Dubstep can feel robotic and groove less when compared to 70's Dub, the subtlety of the beats lost to bland programming. However it is important to understand Dub and Reggae are only a part of the elements that influenced the development of Dubstep so to compare it to the originals is perhaps unfair. As a sound track to increasingly paranoid and hostile urban life it takes just as much inspiration from the more threatening end of Drum & Bass and has produced some exciting music. While it is unlikely the music industry will ever again create the unique environment that spawned Dub it's influence on current music has been so vast that the roots of Dub will keep developing and expanding into the future. If you listen to Dubstep, Garage, Speed Garage, UK Funky, Minimal Techno, Dub Techno, Psytrance or any kind of remix you will almost certainly hear echos of Dub. A good insight into where Dub can go next would be Scientist's album of Dubstep remixes, Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space.
Labels that offer really good stuff are Trojan, Virgin's Front Line, Blood & Fire, Pressure Sounds, Island and Wackies. Good shops for Reggae and Dub are Sounds of the Universe (aka Soul Jazz) on Broadwick Street, Out On The Floor Records in Camden, Honest Jon's at the end of Portobello Road and for the real deal check out Peoples Sound Records on All Saints Road.
Here is a list of some essential albums to get you started. A lot of original dub albums are quite expensive and there are also a lot of cheapo compilations which have poor sound and packaging. The albums below all have good reasonably priced reissues or are well compiled compilations, but with one cheapo one thrown in to get you started!
King Tubby - Father of Dub (super budget, no packaging just 3 CDs of random Tubbyness. However for about £5 you get a good overview of some great tracks so worth a punt as an introduction to Dub)
Lee Perry - Arkology (3 CDs of his greatest productions with lots of cool dubs and brilliant packaging. If you can’t get this try his classic Super Ape album, which throws the less is more rule of Dub out the window by adding more layers to the tracks)
Various Artists - Evolution Of Dub Volume 1 (box set of 4 great albums for a tenner including several classic King Tubby LPs, this is a good value series that goes up to 8 volumes now).
Prince Jammy - Kamikazi Dub (with a great kung fu cover, shows off the harder more stripped down rhythms Jammy used compared to Tubby. My favourite of his albums is Jammies In Lion Dub Style but it is impossible to find anymore. There is also a whole instalment of the above series devoted to Prince Jammy albums, volume 6, which includes Kamikazi Dub)
King Tubby and Friends - Dub Gone Crazy 1 and 2 (Blood & Fire were one of the best Dub reissue labels, a bit rare now but these two compilations feature great stuff from Tubby and his apprentices Scientist, Jammy and Philip Smart)
Keith Hudson - Pick A Dub (one of the two or three stand alone classic Dub albums, see also Super Ape, quirky and stripped to the bone dub from the idiosyncratic Hudson)
Augustus Pablo - Meets Rockers Uptown (all time classic, mixed by King Tubby, featuring Pablo’s mystical melodica playings. Also try East of the River Nile, although this is more an instrumental Reggae album although it has several dubs)
Various Artists - Foundation Dub (the Trojan label brings you a nice mix of classics)
Various Artists - Trojan Dub Box Set 1 and 2 (basic packaging but a whole lot of dub for your money as each set has 3 CDs)
Various Artists - Frontline Presents Dub (good compilation of rare stuff from the Island records vaults, more polished and maybe less daring than the above albums but great music)
Scientist - Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, Big Showdown at King Tubby's, Heavyweight Dub Champion (Scientist is one of the greatest Dub artists but his work is quite pricy, the ones above are my favourites but you can get Scientific Dub and At Channel One albums on Itunes and both are great)
Tappa Zukie – In Dub (featuring Sly &; Robbie rhythms, less well known but a personal favourite)
Joe Gibbs & The Professionals – African Dub Almighty Chapter 3 (the third of three volumes, features lots of weird sound effects by the great underrated engineer Errol “ET” Thompson)
Burning Spear - Living Dub Volume 1 (brilliant dub version of his classic Social Living album, was only available as a remix until recently but now you can download the majestic original on Itunes)
Wackies - Natures Dub (American dub! Some super heavy rhythms from the New York label and studio. Also check out Horace Andy’s album made at Wackies's studio, Dancehall Style, while mainly a vocal album it is produced like a Dub set with extended tracks and a heavy atmosphere, it is also one of the greatest Reggae albums of all time anyway so just get it!)
"An introduction to DUB" > read the full post
