The King of Sound: Genius Returns In the late 60s and early 70s, Jamaican sounds would continue to present innovative ways of connecting to the audience. King Tubby, who made his foray into Dub working as a selector and disc cutter for Duke Reid, was the musical genius behind the invention of dub plates. Using 2 and 4 track tape technology, he would take previously recorded songs and delete the vocal portions, creating ‘instrumentals’ that would soon form the basis of his sets. Once the vocals had been deleted, the track was stripped down to its bare elements, only the drums, bass, and guitar prevailed, this allowed the sounds to include additional percussion and vocal effects including lyrics administered by the deejays. The resultant music flowed much smoother with no interruption or competition from the original vocal elements, which were seen by Tubby as corrupting the purity of the Dub soundscape. Stolzoff sums up the first time Tubby’s dub plates were heard by a live audience: These records had some parts of the vocal track ‘dubbed’ out. Because they sounded exciting to him, [Tubby] asked the selector to play them in the dance. The crowd was so enthralled by their sound that they were played over and over that evening. Because of their popularity and because they were inexpensive to produce, Tubby’s dub versions began to appear on the B-side of records rather than a separate original tune. Taking the core essence of the rhythm and blues tracks favored by Jamaican selectors at the time, the soothing repetitive rhythm of Tubby's dub plates could be played over and over again; adding different live effects—including deejays’ and singers’ vocals, and altering the treble, bass and mid-range levels—each time the dub instrumental played. While minimalism struggled to gain academic footing in the United States and Europe, the prophetic visions of composers such as Eric Satie were being met on this tiny isle in the Caribbean. The repetition of a single or a few different rhythms throughout the evening, ensured a near seamless flow of music pouring out of the sounds’ gigantic speaker cabinets, effectively hypnotizing the audience. No longer cut-off by the onset of a singer’s voice, the jive-style intros—inherited from Machuki—were now extended, by the likes of U Roy et al, into a lyrical structure which pervaded throughout the song. Often guitars and other instruments were removed along with the vocals, leaving only the drums and bass, effectively creating a new rendition of the song, re-casting it from a minimalist perspective. Soon Tubby began implementing the 2 and 4-track studio recorders in his live sets, creating on the spot renditions of earlier works, assessing which components of the original track to highlight and shadow, thereby meeting the highly specific demands of a live audience second to second! A visionary just like Poulsen, and with an electronic savvy equal to or above Hedley Jones, Tubby was a constant inventor of new techniques and devices for manipulating recorded sound. Perhaps the most influential of all the devices Tubby created was the one he named the ‘echo-chamber’. Using sophisticated electronics, this device would record the input sound data and replay it, slightly off-set from the main stream of audio, creating a ‘delay’ or echo effect. Employing hard-wired technology similar to Poulsen’s wire sound reproduction device, Tubby’s instrument foretold the coming of ‘sampler’ technology. Due to Tubby's genius, music leaving the speakers was so much further from the original sound recording; he was creating almost entirely new renditions live with his electronic orchestra pit. The music Tubby created reflected his intimate relation with electronics and seems the anthem of the Electronic Age; he was capturing the sweet bitterness of humanity surrounded by an environment of electronic devices humming the rhtyhm of our modern existence. For some listeners, the magical music of Osbourne Ruddock remains the height of recorded sound art.