Reggae y Dub: the console of a Jamaican sound system with its VU meters lit, the turntable with a record whose label is green, yellow and red, and the record crates marked “Roots,” “Rockers,” “Dub Plates” and “King Tubby”; in the background, the wall of speakers, the crowd and a Bob Marley poster (illustrative image)

Artwork for the Reggae y Dub section · CMTK Archive — illustrative image, not a period photograph

Genre · Classics & Genres

Reggae y Dub

King Tubby and the prehistory of the remix

Before the minitecas were mixing live, the Jamaican sound systems were already reinventing the song from the console: in King Tubby's dub lies the germ of the remix and of the mobile sound culture that Venezuela would inherit in its own way.

Why dub belongs in the miniteca Bible

The magazine opens a window onto Jamaica to point out a distant but real kinship: the Jamaican sound systems — mobile sound rigs that took the party into the street — are the spiritual forebears of the Venezuelan minitecas, and dub is “the prehistory of the remix.” Documenting reggae and dub is not a detour from the subject: it is tracing the origin of two ideas central to the miniteca movement — the mobile sound rig as protagonist, and the creative manipulation of the recording in the booth.

The sound system: the street as dance floor

In the Jamaica of the fifties and sixties, the sound systems were the main form of popular entertainment, above all for those who could not afford the clubs of downtown Kingston. An operator rigged enormous speakers, a selector chose the records and a hype man (the “toaster” or MC) warmed up the crowd. That formula — power, selection and a voice that rouses the crowd — is the same one that, decades later and with an identity of its own, the minitecas would make their own.

King Tubby and the birth of dub

King Tubby — real name Osbourne Ruddock — was a Jamaican sound engineer who in the sixties and seventies turned a studio practice into an art. In the reggae of the day, many singles carried a “version” on the B-side: an instrumental take of the track. Working with those versions for the sound systems' MCs, Ruddock discovered that the mixing desk and the first effects could do far more than remove the vocal: he could bring up the bass and the drums, empty out the arrangement and fill it back in, and add echoes, delays and extreme reverbs until he had built a new piece out of the old one. That is how dub was born.

That is why King Tubby is frequently cited as one of the inventors of the concept of the remix that would later become ubiquitous in dance and electronic music. His sound system — Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi — was, by around 1972, one of the most important on the island, and his studio a school for a whole generation.

The thread that reaches the miniteca

The line is not one of direct cause — the Venezuelan miniteca has a history of its own — but the conceptual kinship is unmistakable: the mobile sound rig as spectacle and the reworking of the recording as a creative act are ideas that dub and the sound systems put into circulation before almost anyone else. Seeing the miniteca inside that global genealogy makes it larger: it was not an isolated phenomenon but a Caribbean chapter of a bigger story of sound, street and mix.

Notes on scope and attribution

Reggae and dub are Jamaican genres that enter the Bible for their influence and their kinship with mobile sound culture, not for being a Venezuelan product. The direct genealogical link between Jamaican sound systems and Venezuelan minitecas is an interpretive framing — a reasonable one, and shared by sound culture — not a proven cause-and-effect relationship, and it is stated as such.

The “first remix” has more than one candidate: the sources note that Ruddy Redwood (Treasure Isle) had already taken the step of physically remixing records to bring out the bass in the rocksteady era, before King Tubby systematized dub. This entry credits Tubby with the invention of dub and the popularization of the remix concept, without denying earlier precedents.

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Credits and sources

· The framing of “sound systems as forebears of the minitecas” and “dub = the prehistory of the remix”: “La Revista de las Minitecas” (DJ Vladimir Medina edition), article on King Tubby / Dub (genre pages, ~49–62).
· Biographical and technical details on King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), the “version,” the birth of dub and Tubby's Home Town Hi-Fi: Wikipedia, “King Tubby”; uDiscoverMusic, “Reggae origins of dub”; Red Bull Music Academy Daily, “The Roots of Dub”; JAMROCK MUSEUM and World A Reggae.
· The nuances of attribution around the “first remix” (Ruddy Redwood, Treasure Isle) are set out in this entry's attribution note.

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Source consulted on July 10, 2026

70s · Vinyl