12 Facts About King Tubby

Osbourne Ruddock, better known as King Tubby, was a Jamaican sound engineer who influenced the development of dub music in the 1960s and 1970s.

King Tubby is often cited as the inventor of the concept of the remix that later became ubiquitous in dance and electronic music production.

King Tubby knew how the circuits worked and what the electrons did.

King Tubby built large amplifiers for the local sound systems.

King Tubby eventually formed his own sound system, King Tubby's Hometown Hi-Fi, in 1958.

When King Tubby was asked to produce versions of songs for sound system MCs or toasters, he initially worked to remove the vocal tracks with the faders on Reid's mixing desk, but soon discovered that the various instrumental tracks could be accentuated, reworked and emphasised through the settings on the mixer and early effects units.

In time, King Tubby began to create wholly new pieces of music by shifting the emphasis in the instrumentals, adding sounds and removing others and adding various special effects, like extreme delays, echoes, reverb and phase effects.

Partly due to the popularity of these early remixes, in 1971, Tubby's soundsystem consolidated its position as one of the most popular in Kingston and Tubby decided to open a studio of his own in Waterhouse in 1971, initially using a 4-track mixer purchased from Byron Lee's Dynamic studio.

King Tubby built on his knowledge of electronics to repair, adapt and design his own studio equipment, which made use of a combination of old devices and new technologies to produce a studio capable of the precise, atmospheric sounds which would become King Tubby's trademark.

King Tubby's name is credited on hundreds of B-side labels, with the possibility that many others were by his hand yet uncredited, due to similarities with his known work.

King Tubby was shot dead on 6 February 1989, outside his home in Duhaney Park, Kingston, upon returning from a session at his Waterhouse studio.

King Tubby's death was believed to be the outcome of a robbery.