Dub
The 8 Best Dub
Tracks of All Time
Jamaican engineers in the early seventies discover that the mixing desk is an instrument. Vocals drop out, the drum and bass are pushed to the front, and reverb becomes the room the record is played in.
- Origin
- Kingston, Jamaica, 1973
- Tempo
- 65–95 BPM
- Also known as
- dub reggae, jamaican dub, version
- Tracks
- 8
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
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Number 1: Augustus Pablo / King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
1976 · Yard Music
The record everyone means by dub. Pablo's melodica floats over a Jacob Miller rhythm that King Tubby keeps dismantling and rebuilding, and the space between the parts carries more weight than the parts do.
Also on 1976, Roots, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 2: The Upsetters / Black Panta
1973 · Upsetter
From Blackboard Jungle Dub, the album usually credited as the first of its kind. Lee Perry treats the multitrack as raw material rather than as a finished thing, and the result still sounds unfinished on purpose.
Number 3: Keith Hudson / Pick a Dub
1974 · Atra
The first album conceived as a dub record from the start rather than assembled from leftovers. Hudson's low end is drier and heavier than his contemporaries', and it is the version a bass player would choose.
Number 4: The Upsetters / Super Ape
1976 · Island
Perry at the Black Ark with every effect running at once, and somehow the murk is legible. The best argument that dub was psychedelia made by people with far better rhythm sections.
Also on 1976
Number 5: The Revolutionaries / Kunta Kinte Dub
1976 · Well Charge
Channel One's house band, produced by Jo Jo Hookim and circulating first as a dubplate. Rebel MC cut it into a jungle record fifteen years later, and the riddim became a founding sound of British bass music without ever leaving Kingston.
Also on 1976, Bass Weight, The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts
Number 6: Burning Spear / The Ghost
1976 · Island
The dub of Marcus Garvey, and a rare case of the version outranking a genuinely great vocal. Removing Winston Rodney's voice leaves the horns hanging in a space that feels haunted rather than empty.
Number 7: Scientist / Dance of the Vampires
1981 · Greensleeves
Tubby's protege turns dub into pure comic-book fun without softening the engineering. The delay throws are timed like punchlines, and the record is funnier and heavier than that description suggests.
Number 8: Wayne Smith / Under Me Sleng Teng
1985 · Jammy's
Not dub but its consequence: a preset from a Casio keyboard becomes a rhythm hundreds of records are built on. The moment Jamaican music goes fully digital, and the template for every riddim-and-version scene since.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred