Ska

What it is

Kingston, 1962, the year of independence, and a studio band at Studio One working out what to do with the American R&B they had been hearing off Miami radio stations all decade. What they did was invert it. The guitar and piano stopped playing on the beat and started chopping the upbeat instead, the bass walked, and the horns played the tune. The drummer, usually Lloyd Knibb, kept a fast shuffle underneath and left the accent to everyone else. It is the root of everything in this family, and the thing that survived every later change of tempo is the afterbeat: whatever the drums are doing, the chord lands between the beats and never on them.

What it sounds like

Bright and loud and slightly out of tune. Horn sections of trombone, trumpet and tenor recorded in one room with one or two microphones, a piano playing short stabbed chords with the sustain pedal untouched, and a hollow-body guitar with the treble up and no reverb chopping eighths. The bass is upright or a Fender played with the tone rolled off, walking in quarter notes. Everything is mono, everything is compressed by the tape rather than by a compressor, and the drums sit further back than a modern ear expects.

Key elements

• The afterbeat skankGuitar and piano hitting the and of every beat, short and damped. This is the element that makes it Jamaican rather than American, and it never moves.
• A walking bassQuarter notes moving through the chord, straight out of jump blues and boogie. Ska is the only genre in this family where the bass walks rather than plays a figure.
• Horn linesTrombone, trumpet and tenor sax playing the melody in unison or close harmony, then soloing over the same two or four chords for as long as the take runs.
• A shuffled kitSnare on 2 and 4, kick on 1 and 3, and hi-hats with a triplet lean. The kit is holding the tempo, not decorating it.
• SpeedBetween 140 and 165. When the same musicians dropped that to eighty a few years later the genre changed name, which tells you how much of ska was tempo.

How to get them

• SkankA clean electric guitar, bridge pickup, tone at maximum, damped with the picking hand so each chord lasts under a sixteenth. Double it with a piano playing the same rhythm and pan them apart by about twenty percent.
• DrumsOne room mic and one overhead is closer to the sound than a full kit mix. Roll the kit off below 80Hz and above 10kHz, then push it into tape saturation until the snare thickens.
• BassUpright, or a Precision with flatwound strings and the tone at zero. Walk in quarter notes and stay under 250Hz. Do not add sub weight; that belongs to the records these musicians made later.
• HornsThree parts, close voiced, recorded together rather than stacked. If you are using samples, detune each part a few cents differently and give them a shared room reverb rather than individual ones.
• Swing58 percent. Ska sits noticeably closer to a triplet feel than anything later in this family, which is the inheritance from jump blues showing through.
• Mix it monoSum the whole thing to mono and check it still works. Every record this style is built on was cut that way, and stereo width flatters arrangements that should be fighting for the same space.

Reference points

The Skatalites, Lloyd Knibb, Don Drummond, Prince Buster, Clement Coxsone Dodd at Studio One, Duke Reid at Treasure Isle, and Ernest Ranglin on guitar. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.