King Tubby: Biography of the Legendary Sound Engineer & Producer

Osbourne Ruddock, a.k.a. King Tubby, was a legendary sound engineer, producer and a major influence on the development of Dub in the 1960s and 1970s. He is credited with inventing the idea of the remix that later characterized the production of electronic music. According to singer Mikey Dread, King Tubby understood sound scientifically because he knew how the circuits worked, and what electronics did.

King Tubby was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on 28 January 1941. He started his career as a radio repairman, and by the late 1950s he started fixing speakers and sound systems all around the city.

A born tinkerer, Ruddock came up with ways to improve things as well, and in 1968 he opened his own shop called Tubby’s Home Town Hi Fi. It became extremely popular thanks to the high-quality sound of his equipment, and to his unique and new echo and reverb sound effects. King Tubby got the chance to fiddle even more in Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio, where he accepted a job as a disc cutter. This is where King Tubby began to take the old concept of remixing to a whole new level.

In fact, before the advent of dub, most Jamaican 45’s featured an instrumental version of the main song on the flipside, which was called the “version”. When Tubby was asked to produce versions of songs for sound system MCs (also known as toasters), Tubby began to create completely new pieces of music by changing the emphasis in the instrumentals, adding/removing sounds and special effects. U-Roy and I-Roy were just some of the stars who made their mark toasting at Tubby’s Hi Fi.

In 1971, King Tubby opened his own studio, which was small and had no capacity to record session musicians. But Tubby initially used a 4-track mixer to re-tape or “dub” the original song after passing it through his custom-built mixing desk, twisting the song into unexpected configurations. Tubby often transformed a hit song to the point where it was almost unrecognisable from the original version. In 1973, King Tubby added a second 4-track mixer and built a vocal booth at his studio, so that he could record vocal tracks onto the instrumental tapes brought to him by various producers.

Bunny Lee kept King Tubby busy with a constant stream of singles to remix: a selection of these were featured in the ground-breaking Dub From the Roots album, and more were featured in King Tubby Meets the Aggrovators at Dub Station. Another successful collaboration was the one with Vivian Jackson, a.k.a. Yabby U, which led to the release of albums like King Tubby’s Prophecy of Dub and Wall of Jerusalem. And Augustus Pablo was also a prominent client: not only did King Tubby remix music for Pablo’s Rockers label, but the duo also released landmark albums like King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, and Rockers Meet King Tubby in a Firehouse. These are just some of the many successful collaborations between King Tubby and countless Jamaican artists. Throughout his career, King Tubby launched different record labels: Firehouse, Waterhouse, Kingston II, and Taurus.

By the end of the 1970s, King Tubby had turned his attention to training a new generation of engineers and producers, including Scientist and Prince Jammy (who become King Jammy after the death of his mentor). By the mid-1980s, King Tubby had shifted into production, and released important singles by Sugar Minott, Anthony Red Rose, Chaka Demus and Johnny Clarke, among others. King Tubbys Presents Soundclash Dubplate Style arrived in 1989, bundling up dubs of his dancehall hits.

Unfortunately, on 6 February of that same year, King Tubby was shot and killed outside his home in Kingston, in what is believed to have been the result of a street robbery. This was a terrible blow for reggae, yet King Tubby’s music is immortal.