Saturday, July 2, 2011

Saturday morning tunes: Dub

Until King Tubby got in the game, the sound engineer was just some guy sitting at a mixing board. He made it a virtuoso instrument:
Tubby began working as a disc cutter for producer Duke Reid in 1968. Reid, one of the major figures in early Jamaican music alongside rival Clement 'Coxsone' Dodd, ran Treasure Isle studios, one of Jamaica's first independent production houses, and was a key producer of ska, rocksteady and eventually reggae recordings. Asked to produce instrumental versions of songs for sound system MCs or toasters, Tubby initially worked to remove the vocal tracks with the sliders on Reid's mixing desk, but soon discovered that the various instrumental tracks could be accentuated, reworked and emphasised through the settings on the mixer and primitive early effects units. In time, Tubby (and others) began to create wholly new pieces of music by shifting the emphasis in the instrumentals, adding sounds and removing others and adding various special effects, like echoes, reverb and phase effects. Partly due to the incredible popularity of these early remixes, 1971 saw Tubby's soundsystem consolidate its position as one of the most popular in Kingston and so he decided to open a studio of his own.

If you're reading this in FB Notes, you'll need to click View Original Post to see the video.

We at p3 strongly recommend that you turn this up loud and crank up the bass.

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