Origins
The entire genre started with a mistake. In 1968, Kingston sound system operator Ruddy Redwood went to Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio to cut a one-off acetate. The engineer, Byron Smith, accidentally left the vocal track off the Paragons’ “On The Beach.” Redwood kept the instrumental anyway and played it at his next dance, where his deejay Wassy toasted over the raw rhythm. The crowd lost their minds. The next day, producer Bunny Lee told King Tubby they needed to make more.
By 1970, Jamaican 7-inch singles routinely carried the vocal mix on the A-side and a stripped-down “version” on the B-side. Those B-sides became the laboratory. The name itself comes from dub plates, one-off acetate discs cut for exclusive sound system use. The word carried multiple meanings in Kingston: copying a recording, emphasizing bass and drums, even a form of dance. All of them fit.
The question of which was the very first dub album remains genuinely contested. At least six records from late 1973 compete for the title: Herman Chin-Loy’s Aquarius Dub, Lee Perry’s Blackboard Jungle Dub (initially pressed in only 300 copies), Clive Chin and Errol Thompson’s Java Java Java Java, and several others. As Red Bull Music Academy documented: “Every producer has some points that would back up their claim, yet the counter evidence is typically just as convincing.”
The Sound
Dub’s fundamental innovation is subtractive. You start with a fully recorded reggae track and remove elements rather than adding them. The vocal disappears. Instruments drop in and out. The remaining sonic space fills with delay, reverb, and echo until the gaps between notes become as important as the notes themselves. The mixing board becomes a performance instrument, and no two mixes are ever identical.
The defining tool was the Roland Space Echo RE-201, introduced in 1974. Its free-running tape transport fed three playback heads with adjustable repeat rate, intensity, and a built-in spring reverb. The intensity knob was the key: turn it up as echoes fade and the unit self-oscillates, swelling into feedback. Turn it down and the echoes die clean. Engineers rode that knob like a fader, sculpting delay in real time.
King Tubby, born Osbourne Ruddock, was an electronics repairman before he was an engineer. He understood circuitry at the component level, built his own amplifiers, wound his own transformers, and modified every piece of gear in his home studio at 18 Dromilly Avenue in Waterhouse, Kingston. His 4-track MCI console (now preserved at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle) had an Altec 9069B high-pass filter in the top-right corner, nicknamed “Big Knob,” which became one of dub’s most distinctive tools. He used a modified Fairchild spring reverb, an old Pioneer SR-101 tube reverb, UREI 1176 compressors, and an MCI 2-track tape machine for tape echo. All of this on four tracks, when international studios were running sixteen or twenty-four.
Lee “Scratch” Perry was the opposite temperament. Where Tubby was precise and surgical, Perry was ecstatic and spiritual. He built the Black Ark studio behind his house in Washington Gardens in 1973 around a TEAC A-3340 quarter-inch four-track. When he later received an 8-track, he barely used it because it “didn’t impart the same vibe.” He sourced spring reverb units from car stereos and piano organs. He used a screwdriver to manually reset the tape counter. He declared the studio “must be like a living thing” and treated the Soundcraft mixing desk as if it were alive.
Sound Systems and Bass Weight
Before any of this reached a studio, it lived outdoors. Jamaican sound systems date to the 1940s: a truck, a generator, turntables, and enormous speakers set up in open spaces. By the 1950s, engineer Hedley Jones was building wardrobe-sized speaker cabinets he called “Houses of Joy,” with crossovers that separated bass, mid, and treble into independently controllable bands. That technique is now fundamental to all dance music. Four speaker stacks posted at the corners of an outdoor space surrounded the audience with music. Modern systems push 30,000 watts of bass alone.
King Tubby ran his own system, Hometown Hi-Fi, from 1958, a full thirteen years before he built the Dromilly Avenue studio. The live experience of extreme low-frequency reproduction directly shaped his production choices. When he stripped a track to a single rimshot echoing across silence, the crowd cheered as if a live band had taken the stage.
Legacy
Dub invented the remix. That sentence is not an exaggeration. The Jamaican practice of issuing dub versions on B-sides created the entire conceptual framework for reworking existing recordings. Every remix, every bootleg, every DJ edit traces its lineage to those Kingston 7-inches.
The influence radiated outward in every direction. Public Image Ltd’s Metal Box (1979) ran Jah Wobble’s dub-weight bass under Keith Levene’s metallic guitar. The Clash worked directly with producer Mikey Dread. Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound label fused dub with post-punk and industrial. In Bristol, the Wild Bunch sound system collective threw parties directly inspired by Jamaican sound system culture. Three of its members formed Massive Attack, and their 1991 debut Blue Lines is generally considered the first trip-hop album.
Dubstep made the connection explicit. It emerged in early-2000s South London, centered on the Forward>> night at Plastic People and pirate station Rinse FM. In 2003, DJ Hatcha played sets cut to 10-inch one-off dubplates, the exact same acetate format that gave dub its name in 1960s Kingston. The tradition came full circle across 35 years and 4,000 miles.
And then there is Prince Jammy, another Tubby apprentice, who in 1985 produced “Under Me Sleng Teng” by Wayne Smith using a preset rhythm from a $99 Casio MT-40 keyboard. One track, one toy keyboard, and the entire analog era of reggae ended overnight.
Essential Listening
- Augustus Pablo & King Tubby – King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (1976)
- Lee Perry & The Upsetters – Super Ape (1976)
- The Congos – Heart of the Congos (1977)
- Lee Perry & The Upsetters – Blackboard Jungle Dub (1973)
- Augustus Pablo – East of the River Nile (1977)
- Scientist – Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981)
- Max Romeo – War Ina Babylon (1976)
- Joe Gibbs & Errol Thompson – African Dub All-Mighty (1976)
- King Tubby – Dub from the Roots (1974)
- Burning Spear – Garvey’s Ghost (1976)
- Prince Jammy – Destroys the Invaders (1982)
- Scientist – Scientist Wins the World Cup (1982)