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Studio / Sound of a genre / Dub · Jamaica, late 1960s

Dub

A dub is a remix made at the desk: the vocal mostly gone, the drums and bass brought forward, echo and reverb thrown on and off, a word or a horn dropped in and out. It began as the B-side of a Jamaican 45, the “version” of the A-side.

The kit

The mixing desk

The instrument. Mutes, faders and the echo send, played by hand while the tape runs.

Tape echo and spring reverb

Repeats that feed back into themselves and a spring that rings behind them.

A reggae multitrack

Drums and bass first, the rest for dropping in. The tempo is the tune’s.

Dub grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. “The Undertaker” by Derrick Harriott and the Crystallites, engineered by Errol Thompson, was one of the first strictly instrumental reggae albums; Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “Blackboard Jungle Dub” (1973), mixed with King Tubby, and Keith Hudson’s “Pick a Dub” (1974), the first deliberately themed dub album, set the shape, and UB40’s “Present Arms in Dub” was the first dub album in the UK top 40. King Tubby, Scientist, Lee Perry and Errol Thompson treated the mixing console as an instrument: start from a multitrack, mute the vocal, and perform the mix with echo throws, reverb, mutes and drops. The echo those desks fed was tape: Roland introduced its first Space Echo units, the RE-100 and RE-200, in 1973, and in 1974 the RE-201, with a longer tape loop, built-in spring reverb, several playback heads for multi-tap patterns and the ability to feed the delayed sound back into the record head so the repeats pile up.

Sources: every date, name and record above comes from XLR’s own lesson Dub, in The Caribbean and Latin America (its sources are listed there), read 2026-11-05; the Space Echo dates and features from BOSS, History of the Space Echo, fetched 2026-11-05. We do not say which echo unit any named engineer owned, because neither page does. The style page: Music / dub.

Make it with what you own

  1. 01Any multitrack or set of stems at a reggae tempo: drums, bass, skank, voice
  2. 02Mute the vocal; leave in a word or a line where it lands
  3. 03A delay on a send with feedback turned up, a spring or plate reverb after it
  4. 04Record the mix as a performance: throw the send open on a snare, mute the bass for a bar, bring it back