Dub

Dub is a style of Jamaican music that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and 1970s, in which a recording engineer takes an existing track apart at the mixing desk and rebuilds it live: the vocal mostly disappears, the drums and bass are pushed to the front, and instruments drop in and out through waves of echo, spring reverb and filtering. It usually moves at reggae's relaxed 60–90 BPM, often felt as a slow one-drop, and its pioneers — King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Errol Thompson, Scientist and King Jammy — turned the mixing console into an instrument.

Dub is reggae's laboratory rather than a separate tradition: most dub tracks are "versions" of existing reggae songs. This guide explains how that practice began, the studio techniques that define it, its main producers and records, its long reach into UK sound systems, post-punk, trip-hop, jungle, dub techno and dubstep, and how it differs from roots reggae and dancehall. To hear how an echo-soaked riddim reads to a machine, try a clip in our free AI music genre detector.

A dub track starts as someone else's song. Jamaican producers recorded rhythm tracks — drums, bass, guitar, keyboards, horns — on multitrack tape and voiced them with singers. An engineer could then return to the multitrack and make a new mix in which the arrangement was the material: muting the vocal after a line or two, letting the bass and drums play alone, sending a single rimshot or guitar chop into a long echo, sweeping the high frequencies away with a filter, and bringing everything back in with a crash. Each mix was a performance, done in real time on the desk, so two dubs of the same rhythm can sound completely different.

The result is music of space and weight. The bass is huge and melodic, the drums are dry and precise, and everything else floats in and out of a cloud of delay and reverb. Vocals appear as fragments — a word, a breath, a phrase repeated by the echo until it dissolves. The effect is hypnotic and often psychedelic, and it was designed to be heard through the massive speaker stacks of Jamaican sound systems, where the low end is felt as much as heard.

"Dub" also names a whole approach to sound that spread far beyond Jamaica: the idea that a mix can be a composition, that subtraction can be as creative as addition, and that echo and bass can carry a track on their own.

Dub's roots are in the sound-system culture of Kingston. In the late 1960s, during the rocksteady era, producers began pressing instrumental versions of their hits on the B-sides of singles. An often-told story credits the sound-system operator Ruddy Redwood with noticing, around 1967–1968, how a crowd reacted when an acetate without the vocal was played by accident; true or not in every detail, the "version" B-side became standard practice, giving DJs a rhythm to toast over and producers a cheap way to fill a single.

The engineer most closely tied to turning versions into an art is King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), a sound-system operator and electronics technician who ran a small studio in Kingston's Waterhouse district. Working from multitrack tapes supplied by producers such as Bunny Lee, he used a customised mixing desk, a high-pass filter and spring reverb and tape echo to strip and rebuild rhythms in real time. Tubby's collaboration with the melodica player and producer Augustus Pablo produced King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1976), one of the most celebrated dub albums.

At the same time Lee "Scratch" Perry built his Black Ark studio in 1973 and developed a denser, murkier, more eccentric sound with his house band the Upsetters, heard on Blackboard Jungle Dub (1973) and Super Ape (1976). Errol Thompson at Randy's studio and the singer-producer Keith Hudson, whose Pick a Dub (1974) is often cited as one of the first albums conceived as dub, all helped define the form.

A second generation came through Tubby's studio. King Jammy (Lloyd James) and Scientist (Hopeton Brown) mixed many of the late-1970s and early-1980s classics, with Scientist's themed albums — such as Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981) — bringing dub to international audiences. Session bands such as the Revolutionaries at Channel One — with drummer Sly Dunbar — and the Roots Radics supplied many of the rhythms.

Dub travelled with the Jamaican diaspora to Britain, where it became a culture of its own. Sound systems such as Jah Shaka's kept roots and dub alive through the 1980s; Dennis Bovell and the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson made British dub records; Mad Professor founded the Ariwa label and studio in London and later remixed Massive Attack's Protection as No Protection (1995); and Adrian Sherwood founded On-U Sound in 1980, bringing dub techniques into post-punk and industrial music.

What defines a dub track:

• Tempo: usually 60–90 BPM, the relaxed tempo of roots reggae; many tracks feel half-time, with the snare or rimshot on beat three in the one-drop pattern.
• Bass first: a deep, round, melodic bassline at the centre of the mix, often louder than anything else.
• Drums exposed: crisp kick and rimshot, hi-hat patterns, and drum fills thrown into echo.
• Subtraction: instruments and vocals muted and reintroduced, so the arrangement keeps changing even though the rhythm loops.
• Echo and delay: tape echo and dedicated delay units (Perry famously used the Roland Space Echo) creating trails that repeat and decay in time with the beat.
• Spring reverb: often struck or overloaded for a crashing "thunder" sound.
• Filtering: high-pass and low-pass sweeps that drain an instrument of bass or treble, then restore it.
• Vocal fragments: snippets of the original song's vocal, left to echo out.

How dub compares with the Jamaican styles around it:

Few styles have shaped so much later music. Dub's ideas — the remix, the extended version, bass as the lead instrument, the mixing desk as an instrument — run through much of the music made since the 1980s.

• The remix and the 12-inch mix: disco and later dance producers took the idea of a stripped, extended "version" into the 12-inch single.
• Toasting and hip-hop: DJs toasting over version sides in Jamaica, and the Jamaican-born Kool Herc in the Bronx, link dub culture to the birth of hip-hop.
• Post-punk: The Clash, The Slits (whose Cut was produced by Dennis Bovell) and Public Image Ltd's Metal Box borrowed dub's bass and space. See post-punk.
• UK steppers and digital dub: faster, militant sound-system dub with a four-on-the-floor kick, from the 1980s and 1990s.
• Trip-hop and downtempo: Bristol's Massive Attack and others built on dub bass and echo; see trip-hop.
• Jungle and drum and bass: reggae and dub bass culture is central to jungle.
• Dub techno: Berlin's Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound in the 1990s fused dub delays and chords with minimal techno.
• Dubstep: the name, the half-time feel and the obsession with sub-bass come straight from UK sound-system dub; see dubstep and our dubstep explainer.

A starter shelf:

Against reggae: dub is reggae remixed. A roots reggae record is a song — a singer, a message, verses and choruses. Its dub version keeps the rhythm and removes most of the song, turning attention to the bass, the drums and the space between them. If you can follow the lyrics, it is reggae; if the singer vanishes after one line and the snare echoes for four bars, it is dub.

Against dancehall: dancehall grew out of the same sound systems but puts the DJ or singer over the riddim in the foreground, and since the mid-1980s has relied increasingly on digital rhythms. Dub is mostly instrumental and analogue in its classic form. Against ska and rocksteady, the difference is era and tempo: those came first, faster and song-driven.

Against dubstep: dubstep is an electronic style from early-2000s London that inherited dub's sub-bass, half-time feel and sound-system culture, but at 140 BPM and built with software rather than tape. For the reggae family more broadly, see our reggae vs reggaeton comparison.

Dub carries strong reggae signals: the off-beat skank on guitar or keyboard (when it is left in the mix), the one-drop drum pattern with its emphasis on beat three, a slow tempo and a deep, prominent bass. Those cues are enough for a model to recognise the reggae family. What is harder is the dub treatment itself: echo, reverb and the absence of vocals are about production, and a heavily stripped section can also sound like downtempo, ambient or trip-hop.

The choice of clip matters. A section with the skank and drums in place reads as reggae; a breakdown where only the bass and a cloud of echo remain is much more ambiguous. Try a few sections of the same track in the Genre AI music genre detector to hear the difference.

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