The impact of dub on modern music is substantial.
Producers including Tubby, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Augustus Pablo and Keith Hudson put their own stamp on the sound, such as employing heavy use of echo effects, beefing up basslines, incorporating snatches of vocals, adding special effects by use of basic ‘dub siren’ synths, or playing pretty melodies on melodicas as a contrast to the low-end pressure. These largely instrumental deejay ‘versions’ became a phenomenon and, by the early ’70s, the sound of dub was established as a distinct form of reggae. Nevertheless, Ruddy played his dubplate and found that crowds enjoyed the sound of his deejay, Wassy, toasting over the instrumental. It may also have played a role in the evolution of rap music thanks to the involvement of the somewhat confusingly named ‘deejay’, the Jamaican term for a host who would perform on the mic, singing and accompanying the music with ‘toasting’, a distinctive Caribbean spoken word lyrical style.īy most accounts, the story of dub starts with a very specific moment in 1968, when Rudolph ‘Ruddy’ Redwood decided to cut a personal dubplate (a one-off record) of The Paragons’ On The Beach for use with his sound system.Ī mistake (or possibly a deliberate last-minute decision) by engineer Byron Smith of Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio meant that the vocals were left off the pressing. Besides the emphasis on production, studio technology and the invention of a basic form of remix, dub’s sound system focus helped to define the bass-heavy sound of modern club culture.
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