Dub music what is it

What purpose did dub serve, and has the form remained static? What, in other words, is dub music all about? Tubby used to tape songs off the radio, like certain time of night he plug in the radio station and play it back into his sound. Producer Glen Brown , another close associate, says Tubby always had an innovative approach to recorded sound. Since the years following World War II, when Jamaicans who went abroad for seasonal farm work encountered black Americans making money at street dances and block parties, sound system culture has defined the Jamaican music scene.

With powerful amplifiers and banks of speaker boxes, sound systems provided the rhythm and blues beloved by the black Jamaican masses, forming an affordable alternative to the costly live jazz scene, which catered to the light-skinned upper class and visiting tourists. Exclusivity became a key factor, with shrewd proprietors removing the labels of their most prized records to stop the competition from locating a copy.

During the late s, these components coalesced in dub, when an incidental moment of studio innovation had drastic repercussions.

A serious thing! The people ah Spanish Town love it! You have to start do something like that. When it start, you hear Slim Smith start to sing and then you hear the voice gone!

Thus begins the incredible tale of dub, which has so much resonance in our present time. But when you go digging into the past of Jamaican music, you often find that things happened earlier than expected. Before U Roy , a deejay was just an incidental figure, someone that told a few jokes between songs and made announcements about future dances.

A major reason for producing multiple versions was economic: a record producer could use a recording he owned to produce numerous versions from a single studio session. A version was also an opportunity for a producer or remix engineer to experiment and vent their more creative side.

The version was typically the B-side of a single, with the A-side dedicated to making a popular hit, and B-side for experimenting and providing something for DJs to talk over.

In the s, LP albums of dub tracks were produced, often simply the dub version of an existing vocal LP, but sometimes a selection of dubbed up instrumental tracks for which no vocals existed.

Dub music evolved from early instrumental reggae music and "versions" that incorporated fairly primitive reverb and echo sound effects. Engineer Byron Smith left the vocal track out by accident, but Redwood kept the result and played it at his next dance with his deejay Wassy toasting over the rhythm. Errol Thompson engineered the first strictly instrumental reggae album entitled The Undertaker by Derrick Harriott and the Crystalites released in This innovative album credits "Sound Effects" to Derrick Harriott.

Whilst some have tried to attribute the "invention" of dub music to just one person, by , instrumental reggae "versions" from various studios had evolved into "dub" as a sub genre of reggae. Through the simultaneous efforts of several independent Jamaican innovators, these competitive engineers and producers worked hard to leapfrog each other with each subsequent dub release with no single person being able to claim all the credit for the origination of "dub" as a genre.

It is considered a landmark recording of this genre. In , Keith Hudson released his classic Pick a Dub , widely considered to have been the first deliberately thematic dub album, with tracks specifically mixed in the dub style for the purpose of appearing together on an LP; and King Tubby released his two debut albums King Tubby Meets the Upsetter at the Grass Roots of Dub and Surrounded by the Dreads at the National Arena.

Dub has continued to progress from that point to this, its popularity waxing and waning with changes in musical fashion. Almost all reggae singles still carry an instrumental version on the B-side and these are still used by the sound systems as a blank canvas for live singers and DJs. Rastafarian DJ Kyle Fartley was one of the original innovators of modern dub heard today.

In the s, Britain became a new center for dub production with Mad Professor and Jah Shaka being the most famous, while Scientist became the rastafarian heavyweight champion of Jamaican dub. It was also the time when dub made its influence known in the work of harder edged, experimental producers such as Adrian Sherwood and the roster of artists on his On-U Sound label.

Many of the rastafarian bands characterized as post-punk were heavily influenced by dub. In the s and beyond, dub has been influenced by and in turn influenced techno , jungle , dubstep , drum and bass , house music , punk and post-punk , trip hop , ambient music , and hip hop , with many electronic dub or dubtronica tracks, as well as Ambient dub , produced by nontraditional rastafarian musicians from these other genres.

In Italy, Val, one of the independent Dub producers, started the project Dubware in , and in the release of the DVD titled Lion Treasure signs the encounter between the Dub music and the Videoart. In , rock band Soundgarden released a dub version of the Ohio Players ' song "Fopp" alongside a more traditional rock cover of the song. DJs appeared towards the end of the s who specialised in playing music by these musicians, such as the UK's Unity Dub.

Since the inception of dub in the 70s it was intertwined with the punk rock scene in the UK. In the U. The verb dub is defined as making a copy of one recording to another. Some musicians, for instance Bob Marley and The Wailers, had their own meaning for the term dub. Drummer Sly Dunbar points to a similar interpretation, relating the term dubwise to using only drums and bass. Another possible source was the term dub plate, as suggested by Augustus Pablo.

The instrumental tracks are typically drenched in sound effects such as echo, reverberation, with instruments and vocals dropping in and out of the mix. Another hallmark of the dub sound is the prominent use of bass guitar.

The music sometimes features other noises, such as birds singing, thunder and lightning, water flowing, and producers shouting instructions at the musicians.

The many-layered sounds with varying echoes and volumes are often said to create soundscapes, or sound sculptures, drawing attention tot he shape and depth oft he space between sounds as well as the sounds themselves.

There is usually a distinctly organic feel tot he music, even though the effects are electronically created. Dub music and toasting introduced a new era of creativity in reggae music. From their beginning, toasting and dub music developed together and influenced each other. Versions and experiments with studio mixing Late s.