Welcome back to my annual xmas countdown! To start us off, I offer a wonderfully relaxed dub remix (recomposition? version? I suppose a dub is not really a remix, but an instrumental reworking) by the French DJ Mato. This song got me wondering about where dub came from. I mean, “Jamaica” is an answer I knew, but my internet wanderings have led me to learn a bit more about late 1960s recording technology and sound systems.
“Sound systems” does not refer here to machines, but to mobile disco groups (think: speakers, amplifiers, turntables, DJs) who would compete for crowds by playing exclusive music. Studios would cut exclusive dubplates, soft records made of acetate rather than vinyl, directly with lathes, rather than hydraulically pressing them in large quantities. In the 1960s, when studios began multitrack recording, they also began carving B-sides with just the instrumental track, which became popular possibly by accident:
the instrumental B-side became de rigueur, following a mixing innovation by engineer Byron Smith, which may or may not have been accidental: while mixing down an exclusive acetate for Ruddy Redwood's SRS sound system, Smith removed the vocals, and the resultant raw rhythms proved extremely popular at Ruddy's dances, particularly after U-Roy ad-libbed fluid toasts over them.
Dub emerged from the live mixing of these instrumental tasks into new, exclusive rhythms in the studios. One of the major developers of dub was King Tubby, who got his start as a radio repairman working for sound systems that needed their equipment fixed due to tropical weather (rather ambitious to maintain mobile outdoor sound equipment in a place where the humidity comfort level is rated as >80% “oppressive” for a third of the year) or occasional sabotage by rival sound systems. In 1972, Tubby acquired a 12-into-4 console, and began creating experiments with reverb, EQ filtering, stripped-down rhythm, and other things I now think of as characteristic of dub.
There is some deep way in which I feel confused reading about all this, even though my uncle is a sound engineer. I had to go back and remind myself that the information is not stored in 1s and 0s somewhere. Tubby was… playing… tapes. Magnetic tapes, two tracks split in parallel down the sheet of plastic, which get turned into electrical signals and split across 12 inputs, each of which can be processed differently (using analog circuits, think capacitors and potentiometers), and then summed back together into 4 outputs? Or sent to delays or reverbs, the latter effect being produced by mechanical springs vibrating in a metal box, which is maybe still in common use? I am confused about how much sound equipment now is analog versus digital. Apparently some Tubby dubs have a loud “clang” on them created by “whacking a spring reverb with a large stick”, which might be sort of hard to reproduce predictably through digital signal processing.
It doesn’t seem obvious to me that we get dub just from the advent of multitrack recordings; that kind of live mixing feels like an important branch of the cultural technology tree that leads to today’s remix and EDM culture, but it seems like we might not have got it without accidental vocal drops and competitive Jamaican dance parties,
Enjoying the sounds of jingle bells via Kingston via Paris,
Tessa