Dub music
Dub is a Jamaican music style built by reshaping recorded tracks, foregrounding bass and drums while using echo, reverb, and other studio effects.
Dub mixing: A performance practice that reshapes a multitrack recording through live fader moves, effects, and selective muting. The mixer creates dub’s shifting foregrounds by bringing parts in and out of the mix.
Jamaican music: The island’s diverse musical traditions, including mento, ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall. Dub grew from Jamaican popular music and remained closely tied to its local scenes.
Reggae: A Jamaican popular music genre that developed from ska and rocksteady, with a characteristic offbeat rhythm. Dub most often reworks reggae recordings, preserving their rhythmic foundations while altering their presentation.
Remix: A new version of a recording made by rearranging, processing, or replacing parts of its source material. Dub helped establish remixing as a creative practice rather than merely a technical correction.
Multitrack recording: A recording method that captures separate sound sources on independently editable tracks. Separate tracks let dub mixers isolate instruments and rebuild a song’s balance.
King Tubby: A Jamaican sound engineer and producer whose mixing techniques helped define dub. His studio experiments established many of the style’s characteristic effects and arrangements.
Rocksteady: A Jamaican popular music style that followed ska in the late 1960s and preceded reggae. Rocksteady recordings and their studio practices formed part of dub’s early musical source material.
Hip-hop production: The creation and arrangement of recorded tracks for hip-hop, often using samples, programmed beats, and studio processing. Dub’s emphasis on the mix and the instrumental break resonated with later sample-based production.
Tape echo: An audio effect that records sound onto magnetic tape and plays it back after a short delay. Its repeating trails became a signature way to transform vocal and instrumental fragments.
Osbourne Ruddock: The birth name of King Tubby, the Jamaican engineer and producer associated with early dub. His Kingston studio became a key workshop for turning reggae recordings into dub versions.