STORY · REGGAE
King Tubby's school of engineers
Well supported
At Waterhouse and Maxfield Avenue, the mixing engineer stopped being a technician and became an author.
How King Tubby's apprentices and the Channel One desk men turned dub mixing into a form of composition.
The desk becomes an instrument
When King Tubby began dropping instruments in and out and drenching fragments in reverb, the mix itself became the performance. His Waterhouse studio trained the next generation, and producer Glen Brown was the first to put Tubby's name on a 45 as an artist - an admission that the engineer was now an author.
The apprenticeship spread. Prince Jammy and Scientist learned to cut dubs at the controls, and Philip Smart, Tubby's first trainee, took the method to New York, opening HC&F on Long Island where a diaspora dancehall scene grew.
The Maxfield Avenue desk
A second workshop ran at Channel One, where engineers Crucial Bunny and Soljie Hamilton, and keyboard-arranger Ossie Hibbert, shaped the Hoo Kim sound. The 'Crucial Bunny vs Scientist' dub albums even staged the engineer as a clashing star.
The credit moved from the singer to the hands on the faders.
This is the argument the atlas files under the dub engineer as performer: a lineage in which mixing is composition, and the studio is a stage.