STORY · REGGAE
Dub and the version
Probable
How the B-side and the mixing desk became instruments.
Engineers stripped vocals, drenched the track in echo and reverb, and turned the "version" into a new art — dub.
Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock was an electronics repairman who built and customized his own mixing equipment for his sound system, Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi. Working from instrumental "version" B-sides that Jamaican singles already carried, Tubby began stripping vocals out of multitrack masters, then rebuilding the track live at the mixing desk - dropping instruments in and out, drenching sections in echo, delay and reverb, and pushing bass and drums to the front. Opening his own Waterhouse studio in 1971 around a 4-track (later 12-channel) custom-built MCI desk, Tubby effectively played the mixer as an instrument, turning the remix into dub: a genre still built on the same idea of an existing recording taken apart and reassembled as something new.
King Tubby and the origins of dub: Wikipedia; uDiscover Music. King Tubby is widely credited as dub's key originator, though other engineers (Errol Thompson, Lee "Scratch" Perry) were developing similar techniques around the same period - the atlas notes King Tubby's role as foundational, not exclusive.