Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae by Michael Veal

English | 2007 | ISBN:0819565725 | 353 pages | PDF | 7 MB
When Jamaican recording engineers Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Errol Thompson, and Lee “Scratch” Perry began crafting “dub” music in the early 1970s, they were initiating a musical revolution that continues to have worldwide influence. Dub is a sub-genre of Jamaican reggae that flourished during reggae’s “golden age” of the late 1960s through the early 1980s. Dub involves remixing existing recordings—electronically improvising sound effects and altering vocal tracks—to create its unique sound. Just as hip-hop turned phonograph turntables into musical instruments, dub turned the mixing and sound processing technologies of the recording studio into instruments of composition and real-time improvisation. In addition to chronicling dub’s development and offering the first thorough analysis of the music itself, author Michael Veal examines dub’s social significance in Jamaican culture. He further explores the “dub revolution” that has crossed musical and cultural boundaries for over thirty years, influencing a wide variety of musical genres around
the globe.
This is the definitive book on the style of music called dub, developed in and associated with Jamaica. Author Michael E. Veal has interviewed a number of dub originators, and he has gone into great detail about how the music was put together in various studios. Dub could be called the predecessor of hip-hop and sampling. Veal shows that many of the techniques used in today's urban music were developed by dub producers in the 1970s.