Category: Dub Reggae

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Bunny “Striker” Lee interview – Part 1

One of Jamaica’s most prolific and influential producers, Bunny Lee is well placed to takes us through the history of Jamaican music, from the early days of Tom the Great Sebastian, to the Vere Johns talent show, and the emergence of ska. He recalls his days as a radio plugger in the “dodgy business” of music and his peak producing years between 1969 and 1975, when he had a series of hits with the likes of Slim Smith and Delroy Wilson. Along the way are fascinating comments on such seminal figures as Leslie Kong, King Tubby, and U Roy. And then things get really interesting, as he explains to Steve Barrow and Don Letts how Derrick Morgan gave Bob Marley his break, the significance of Big Youth’s dreadlocks, his “Dreadlocks Dread”, and the “John Crow Skank”. All this is followed by an extended, extraordinary diatribe about how Byron Lee “tried to kill reggae”.

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Paul “Groucho” Smykle

An interview from Red Bull Music academy daily with Paul “Groucho” Smykle. Click here for full article.

Very much a behind the scenes figure, Paul ‘Groucho’ Smykle mixed some of the most intense dub works to be released during the ’80s and ’90s. As one of Island Records’ in-house engineers, dubmaster Groucho etched his mark on prime works by Black Uhuru, Sly and Robbie and Ini Kamoze, and was probably the first mixer to subject African music to the extreme sonic textures of dub.

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Wise words from Mad Professor

Dub puts the Engineer’s Skills Center Stage

“Before dub, as the engineer, you had to ‘not be seen and not be heard’, as the proverb goes! Because if you had an identity on a track, you were not fulfilling what an engineer was supposed to do, which was basically to be invisible. You were already invisible, being on the other side of the board, but you were also supposed to be invisible in a sonic way. We reversed that with dub music. From the point where you heard a drum roll, you could go ‘Yeah, that sounds like Erryl Thompson recorded that roll!’”

Home-brew analogue equipment has always been at the heart of the dub sound

…and Mad Professor clearly feels that the sonic identity dub mixers worked so hard to establish is threatened by the rise of digital gear. “We spent years developing an identity, where you could hear exactly who’d done what. The problem with the digital format is that the more a producer leans on it, the less of his identity is stamped on the record. The digital thing takes that away. 

Anything you do on your digital system, he can do it as well

According to Mad Professor, “The difference between the real dub and the digital euro dub, made on a computer, is that the real dub is built on songs. When you hear a good dub album from the ’70s by Tubby or Perry, the tracks are built on songs with proper constructions. Original melodies. A lot of the new guys don’t build on good a song, or at least not a very good song, so it doesn’t take you anywhere. It’s a marriage between music and technology.”

We always have our effects hooked up

The first stereo auxiliary is always my reverb, a Lexicon 480l. It’s a quad-input reverb, one of the most developed reverb units ever, so we could have two stereo auxiliaries to that one. That’s always on and comes back into two stereo splits. Next, we got our delay. I’ve always used the Roland SD3000, I think that’s one of the best delays ever built. A magic delay. I also use MXR phasers, quite a collector’s thing — I’ve got them hooked up to the desk as well.”

“Truth is, after having made several hundreds of records, if you do everything one way, you’d soon have to stop. It’s all challenging and it’s a challenge to take everything in its own context and to have a different approach. “You have to approach each project in a different way. You can’t just say ‘I always do this, so I’ll just do it again.’ I don’t know what other people do and as for me, I just do what I feel for in the moment. It’s like what you want to eat: some days you want curry, some days something else. Sometimes I want a long echo, sometimes I want a short one.”