![]() The easiest starting point in hardware form is probably with a pedal-based spring reverb effect, which are usually aimed at guitar players. The other essential style of echo is the twangy, metallic sound of spring reverb. Arturia’s Delay TAPE-201 is excellent, priced at 99 euros. Decent vintage units start at around £500, but there are also software emulations and digital clones available at lower price points. As all-rounders go, it’s very hard to beat a classic Roland Space Echo, the hardware unit which is probably most closely associated with the tape echo sound.īut it’s not cheap. Tape echoes are a classic sound, giving an organic, loose feel to your delay effects. Three dub essentials Tape echoĮchoes are essential to the dub sound, and there are plenty of options to choose from. Dub has influenced us all, whether we know it or not. There remains a small but loyal dub scene around the world, but perhaps the best way to judge dub’s colossal cultural impact is to reflect on just how many of its defining characteristics we take for granted as part and parcel of other genres. Black Ark met its demise in 1979, when Perry scrawled all over the studio in magic marker before burning it to the ground to cleanse “unclean spirits”. Whether recording the sound from under ground while hitting a palm tree or blowing marijuana smoke into the microphone “so that the weed would get into the song,” Perry never stopped experimenting. ![]() Some of the personalities of dub are just as distinctive as the sound itself, and it would be remiss to complete any discussion of the genre without a nod to the eccentric and wildly creative life of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, whose backyard Black Ark studio was the setting for a somewhat chaotic but hugely effective artistic process. On a technical level, the process of the producer performing the track as a live mixdown with effects and multitrack parts being punched in and out in real time has become a mainstay of electronic production techniques. There are genres which borrow explicitly from the bass-heavy, sound system-driven approach, such as dubstep, trip-hop and dub techno but we can go so far as to see dub as the foundation of the very idea of the auteur producer, responsible for overseeing the entire creative process. The impact of dub on modern music is substantial. The idea of dub versions came to overlap heavily with the broader reggae concept of ‘riddims’ (rhythms in Jamaican patois), the use of instrumental backing tracks as a basic building block of music, available to be repurposed not just by deejays at a dance, but by artists for their own records. There are genres which borrow explicitly from the bass-heavy, sound system-driven approach, such as dubstep, trip-hop and dub techno. 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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