Dub

What it is

Osbourne Ruddock, known as King Tubby, ran a sound system and repaired electronics in Waterhouse, and at some point around 1970 he started cutting instrumental versions of vocal records for his own dances. Then he started removing things while the disc was being cut. The vocal drops out for eight bars and comes back for one word covered in echo, the bass disappears and the drums are alone in a room that suddenly sounds enormous, the whole rhythm cuts to a snare hit ringing into a spring. It is a genre made entirely of subtraction and effects, performed live on a four-track desk with high-pass filters that Tubby modified himself. The drum pattern is usually just a riddim someone else already recorded. What makes it dub is what is missing and what is drowning.

What it sounds like

Enormous and empty. A spring reverb tank being crashed on purpose, tape delay feeding back until it distorts and then being pulled down before it screams, a high-pass filter sweeping the whole mix up to nothing and dropping it back. Instruments arrive one at a time and leave without warning. The bass is louder than anything ever recorded before it and often the only thing playing. Vocals are fragments: a syllable repeated six times, decaying. Nothing is quantised because nothing was programmed; this is a person moving faders in real time and printing the take.

Key elements

• SubtractionThe arrangement is the mute buttons. Parts drop out for bars at a time and the listener holds the missing ones in their head, which is the whole trick.
• Spring reverb, crashedA real spring tank being physically knocked or hit with a burst of level so the springs clatter. Tubby's is the most imitated sound in the genre and no plate does it.
• Tape delay feedbackA Space Echo or a Copicat run just below self-oscillation, with the feedback ridden by hand so a single word turns into a phrase that dissolves.
• The high-pass sweepTubby modified his desk to give him a filter he could sweep across the whole mix, taking the bass out from underneath and letting it fall back in. It functions as a drop.
• The versionA dub is made from an existing rhythm track, usually the B side of a vocal single. Building the riddim and mixing the dub are two separate crafts and often two separate people.

How to get them

• Start with a finished riddimRecord or program a complete one drop or steppers track first, then mute most of it. Mixing a dub from a sketch does not work, because the holes only read if something was there.
• Set up two sendsOne spring reverb and one tape delay, both on auxes with the return faders where your hands are. Do not put them on channel inserts; the performance is in sending things in and out.
• Delay timeSet the echo to a dotted eighth or a quarter of your tempo, feedback at about 70 percent, and detune the repeats slightly. Automate the feedback, not the send level, for the runaway effect.
• Filter the whole mixA high-pass on the master bus with the cutoff on a controller. Sweep it up over two bars, hold it, then drop it in one movement on a downbeat.
• Record the performanceDo it in one pass with your hands on the faders and keep the mistakes. Editing a dub together afterwards produces something that sounds correct and dead.
• Swing55 percent, inherited from whatever one drop you built it on. Dub does not have a feel of its own; it borrows the drummer's.

Reference points

King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry at the Black Ark, Errol Thompson, Scientist, Prince Jammy, Augustus Pablo, Mad Professor. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.