DUB DISCUSSION BOARD

hey guys this is my first post.... not sure why it took me so long to find this board! I was searching for something on King Tubby on google and came across it.

I've been making some techno and house for a couple of years now... and got into Dub music slowly by listening to old Basic Channel/Rhythm & Sound related records. Then I moved on to some Lee Perry, the King, Wackies, etc...

I've noticed that a lot of these old dub records as well as the rhythm & sound stuff have a thick hiss/noise in the background that kinda swirls around with the rest of the stuff... it's def. not just the analog gear... there has to be something else behind it. I've used some analog drum machines for production and they usually create more of a Hum rather than the Hiss I mentioned.

Is it the analog revebr boxes that are creating this sexy hiss??

also... are most of the basses on old Dub recorded from a bass guitar? how can one do something similar using a computer? samples? or maybe a Vst? usally vsts like Rop Papen's Albino create some good bass but it's usually not as thick.

I'm glad I found this board

cheers

Welcome to the board!

Regarding hiss: Spring reverbs as well as tape delays and the tape machines used for recording do add hiss. I think that's where it comes from. If you hear something swirling it might be the result of sending a signal with hiss through a phaser.
The riddim&sound stuff was produced recently so I am sure that any hiss you can hear on these recordings was intentionally put in the mix.

Regarding bass on old dub records: Bass was done with a bass guitar on almost all tracks I know ("Revolutionary Dream" by pablo moses is an exception - It's a vocal track though). I did use sampled bass and synth with good results - However it must be said that a bass played live by a tight musician has many subtleties that cannot be reproduced using a synth or samples. Particularly when playing music on a big sound system these missing subtleties can make a bass line sound boring and lifeless. This is even more the case as in dub the bass has a lead role.

Reguarding bass, I have found recording a standard guitar and then lowering it by an octave can give a much more organic sound than using a synth. How i do it sometimes is to keep to the E and A strings and afterwards completely cut most of the higher frequencies. It seems to me an ok substitution. This can not always sound so good, especially with my setup which is nothing more than a lead straight from the guitar to my laptops mic input (no amps), and the lowering by an octave (which i just do with Abletons standard knob for adjusting pitch of a wav) can often have unwanted cracking/distortion. Is there a better way of doing this (with my very limited hardware)?

About hiss:
The first track here by Rhythm & Sound
http://www.last.fm/music/Rhythm%2B%2526%2BSound

certainly has a lot of hiss. This is more hiss than on any 70'd dub I've heard. On old dub if you can hear any hiss, it would have been an unavoidable by-product of the analogue equipment and tape.
Rhythm & Sound must be deliberately adding it, at least on that first track. Whether you think it improves the track and you'd want to add hiss yourself that is up to you. I don't know what the best source of hiss is though- there are various things you could try - the first thing I might try is play a blank cassette tape into my DAW at high gain. A band pass filter on white or pink noise might work too.

Bass - certainly on nearly all pre-80's dub the bass would have been bass guitar. There was very little use of synths on 70's dub.

there is what appears to be very deliberate hiss in a version which i forget the artist/engineer of "mariguana" ("mariguana, mariguana, jah send it on yuh, feel allright now.." is the vocals i can remember)

The hiss builds independant of any other effects (as far as my untrained ears can make out). It works really well on that track, the only one i am aware of with deliberate hiss.

Um.. i forget my point..