King Tubby

• 1. Introduction

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  King Tubby was born Osbourne Ruddock on the 28th of January 1941 in Jamaica, and by the time he died on the 6th of February 1989, he had quietly changed the way human beings think about recorded sound. He was not a singer, not a guitarist, not a composer in any traditional sense. He was a radio repairman who turned a mixing desk into an instrument and, in doing so, invented a concept that would come to define dance music, hip-hop, and electronic production for decades: the remix. Singer Mikey Dread put it plainly: "King Tubby truly understood sound in a scientific sense. He knew how the circuits worked and what the electrons did. That's why he could do what he did." How does a man who fixes televisions on Drumalie Avenue in Kingston end up credited as one of the most influential figures in the history of recorded music? And what exactly happens inside a mixing desk when genius takes hold of it?

• 2. The Repairman's Ear

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  Kingston's sound system scene was already gathering momentum in the late 1950s, when Tubby first made himself useful to it. The tropical climate of the Caribbean island, combined with deliberate sabotage by rival sound system operators, meant amplifiers and speakers failed constantly. Tubby had the skills to fix them, and he moved through that world with a repairman's quiet authority. His electrical repair shop on Drumalie Avenue fixed radios and televisions, but the real education was inside the machines. In 1961-62, he built his own radio transmitter from scratch and briefly ran a pirate station playing ska and rhythm and blues, before shutting it down when word reached him that police were hunting the illegal broadcasters. That self-taught confidence with circuits would never leave him. He had already formed his own sound system, Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi, in 1958, and it stood apart from competitors not just through the quality of its gear but through something nobody else had managed outside a studio: live echo and reverb effects. Those effects also helped launch the career of U-Roy, who served as the sound system's featured toaster.

• 3. Duke Reid and the Version

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  In 1968, Tubby took a job as a disc cutter for producer Duke Reid, one of the commanding figures of early Jamaican music alongside his longtime rival Clement "Coxsone" Dodd. Reid ran Treasure Isle studios, one of Jamaica's first independent production houses, and had been central to the development of ska, rocksteady, and reggae. Before dub existed as a genre, Jamaican 45s carried a convention: the flipside of any single was an instrumental version of the main song, simply called the "version." When Tubby was tasked with making versions for sound system MCs and toasters, he started by stripping the vocal tracks using the faders on Reid's mixing desk. That practical act opened something unexpected. The individual instrumental tracks could each be pushed forward or pulled back, shaped with the early effects units available to him, and rearranged into entirely new forms. What began as a technical task to serve the sound systems became a creative process in its own right. By 1971, these early experiments had lifted Tubby's sound system to one of the most popular in Kingston, and that popularity gave him the leverage to open a studio of his own in Waterhouse, initially built around a 4-track mixer he purchased from Byron Lee's Dynamic studio.

• 4. The Big Knob

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  What made Tubby's studio sound different from anything that had come before was partly the result of a piece of second-hand equipment. The 12-channel, custom-built MCI mixing desk he acquired from Dynamic Studios had a built-in high-pass filter - a parametric EQ controlled by a large knob that Tubby and those who worked with him simply called the "big knob." By turning it, Tubby could introduce a dramatic narrowing sweep across any signal: a horn section, for example, would narrow and narrow until it vanished into a thin, high squeal. No other engineer was using a mixing desk this way. Tubby also built and repaired his own equipment, combining old devices with newer technologies to achieve sounds that a standard studio setup could not produce. He connected a variety of effects units to the mixer and then played the whole rig as though it were an instrument - pulling vocals abruptly in and out, dropping drum patterns, letting bass lines surge to the front and then disappear. The studio had no facility for recording session musicians; it worked entirely from existing multitrack master tapes, which Tubby "dubbed," or re-taped, after passing them through his custom setup. By the end of 1971, producers such as Glen Brown and Lee "Scratch" Perry were already coming to him for dub mixes.

• 5. A Genre Born in Waterhouse

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  The range of producers and artists who moved through Tubby's Waterhouse studio in the 1970s reads as a directory of Jamaica's most important musical talent. Lee Perry, Bunny Lee, Augustus Pablo, and Vivian Jackson all brought work to him, and the artists featured on those recordings included Johnny Clarke, Cornell Campbell, Linval Thompson, Horace Andy, Big Joe, Delroy Wilson, and Jah Stitch. In 1973, Tubby expanded the studio by adding a second 4-track mixer and constructing a vocal booth, which allowed him to record new vocal tracks directly onto the instrumental tapes producers supplied. This process earned its own Jamaican term: "voicing." Two of the earliest full dub albums, the Lee Perry-produced Blackboard Jungle and Bunny Lee's Dub from the Roots, both appeared in 1974, and both carried Tubby's name. The sheer volume of his output across labels and producers made a complete discography almost impossible to compile; his name appears on hundreds of B-side labels, and similarities with his known work suggest many more go uncredited. The scale of the work, more than any single release, established dub music as a genre.

• 6. Rockers Uptown

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  One track from 1974 became the clearest demonstration of what Tubby could do with a recording that already existed. The original session had produced a Jacob Miller song called "Baby I Love You So," featuring Carlton Barrett - Bob Marley's drummer - playing a traditional one drop rhythm. When Tubby finished his dub version of the track, Barrett's drums had been processed to the point where they regenerated several times within the mix, producing a rhythm that had not been there before. Augustus Pablo played melodica on the same recording. The result was tagged with the name "rockers" to describe that new rhythmic feel. The track appeared on Pablo's 1976 album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown and went on to be cited as one of the most popular dubs ever made. "King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown" stands as a demonstration of the remix concept in its purest form: a source recording transformed so completely that the transformation itself becomes the artistic achievement.

• 7. Protegees and the Later Years

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  By the later part of the 1970s, Tubby had stepped back from the daily work of mixing, though he continued occasionally and took on the role of teacher to a new generation. Among those he tutored were King Jammy and Hopeton Brown, who performed under the name Scientist and whom Tubby regarded as perhaps his greatest protege. In the 1980s, he built a new and larger studio in the Waterhouse neighbourhood with capabilities his original space had lacked. He turned his attention to managing a group of labels he had founded: Firehouse, Waterhouse, Kingston 11, and Taurus. Those labels released productions featuring Anthony Red Rose, Sugar Minott, Conroy Smith, King Everald, and other musicians who were part of Kingston's active recording scene at the time. On the 6th of February 1989, Tubby was shot dead outside his home in Duhaney Park upon returning from a late session at his Waterhouse studio. His death was believed to be the result of a robbery. He was forty-eight years old. The 1994 compilation Dub Gone Crazy: The Evolution of Dub at King Tubby's 1975-1979, released on Blood and Fire, gathered recordings from the decade when his influence was at its height.