STORY · REGGAE
King Tubby and the remix
Probable
How a Waterhouse engineer turned mixing into an instrument and previewed the remix age.
King Tubby's dub techniques — dropping parts in and out, drenching them in echo — reframed the record as raw material to be remade.
Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock was an electronics repairman before he was a producer, and it shows in how he worked: at his own sound system, Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi, he built and modified his own mixing equipment, then at his Waterhouse studio (opened 1971, built initially around a 4-track desk bought from Byron Lee's Dynamic studio) he began stripping vocals from existing multitrack masters and reassembling them live - dropping instruments in and out, soaking sections in echo and reverb. What started as a technical trick for making sound-system "specials" became dub, a genre in its own right, and Tubby is widely credited as the person who effectively invented the remix: the idea that an existing recording is raw material, not a finished object.
King Tubby's biography and dub innovations: Wikipedia. Same King Tubby facts as "dub and the version" (seed 122) but framed here around the remix/dubplate legacy rather than the sonic technique itself - the two stories share a subject deliberately, from different angles.