Roots Archives Forum

**Although is that how the early treasure Isle dub albums were done does anyone know?**

Like many of the latter Studio One dub LPs, the original tracks had drum & bass re-recorded on top. Listen to how distinct the one-drop drumming is in the TIsle dubs versus the rest of the instrumentation, and compared to the original recordings that were versioned.

Funky Punk wrote:What a waste. He could be putting King Tubby's name on all that and licensing it to white people.

I love this post.

davek wrote:Some say that advances in multi-track boards actually killed the creativity and flair of dub.

For me this is true.
With the technical progress providing too many possibilities and impossibilities just to pick up they seem loosing imagination.
Especially in the later 70's and early 80's they had a huge output of musically inspired and technically top notch dub. But you could already hear that sheer technique was beginning to take over, travelling further to digi dub. What they lost was this incredible charming sound of the early years, when they was forced into creativity by the absence of 1001 machine buttons waiting to get pushed.
1973 - 1983 was high times for dub.

Funky Punk wrote:
What a waste. He could be putting King Tubby's name on all that and licensing it to white people.

Good job I just finished my OJ otherwise I would have spat it all out over the monitor laughing

davek wrote:Although is that how the early treasure Isle dub albums were done does anyone know?

Like many of the latter Studio One dub LPs, the original tracks had drum & bass re-recorded on top. Listen to how distinct the one-drop drumming is in the TIsle dubs versus the rest of the instrumentation, and compared to the original recordings that were versioned.

Very intresting, I need to put down this Barry Brown album and take a listen to Treasure Ilse dubs to hear that

CONGO BUNNY wrote: As for older tape productions I bet most of them were re-recorded over, trashed, left to decay over time etc. Perry is alleged to have buried some of his in his back yard, so all you need is a plane ticket and a shovel and you could be making Black Ark dubs (joke)

The (joke) part absolutely crushed me.

Maybe it's better this stuff elegantly disappears rather than getting cut and re-cut and resurrected in zombie form endlessly. But, it's pretty heavy to think that all this legendary stuff is just gone forever, I can't help but feel a twinge of sadness at that.

Hard to believe how casually the original recording were treated, being lent out and re-recorded over, forgotten in basements...

This is how I make dub:

I record the songs to a multitrack recorder (preferably tape). I then run the outs of the multi track back into my mixer. This is common practice in recording (the mix-down). I pulled a reverb tank out of a guitar amp and have a 2-track basic reel to reel that if set up right, makes a killer delay (echo). Then you find the dub! This is how I would assume they did it back then since all these convenient effects were not so available back then. But there is a little more to it. It is similar in concept to what hip hop or rap artists do when they are sampling other songs to make their own. Dub is a producer and engineer's way of sampling using the different instruments on the tracks to rebuild or remix a recorded song.

CONGO BUNNY wrote:
Yea I bet he does, its a sin to think what unreleased reggae is rotting away in JA as we speak

It's heart breaking. I saw some of Bunny Lee material in a video and one could tell, the unreleased stuff is just wasting away there, while some of us are stuck in a crucible of suffering and longing for that next track the ear hasn't heard before...BL is committing the most cardinal sin