How to Set Up a Mixer for Making Dub Music
Dub music emerged from Jamaican studios in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dub got its name from songs where the A versions were remixed as B sides with the vocals "dubbed" out of the mix. Dub music is characterized by lots of hard panning, heavily-reverberated snares and drum fills, and an emphasis on the rhythm section of drums and bass.
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Instructions
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Connect your mixer to your computer recording workstation or hardware recording device to output your mix.
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Assign each output channel of the recording to an individual input channel on the mixing console.
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Connect the master outs of the mixing console to a tertiary computer workstation or recording device for output.
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Use the 1/4" insert jacks on each channel of the console to connect to reverb, delay, flanger, or other effects.
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If your mixer has assignable sub groups, group your instruments and drums into manageable subs that you can apply mutliple effects to at once.
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Make your dub mix in real-time to your recording device. Use hard pans, turning channels on and off (dub often drops out to just the bass and drums), quick delays and reverbs on snares and drum fills. Flanger, chorus, and vocoder effects are also common in dub music.
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Tips & Warnings
Before mixing dub music, if you are not familiar, do research and listen to a lot of dub music to get a feel for the mixing style. Listen to the way the drums pan through the stereo field throughout the song. Listen to how different instruments move in and out of the mix at certain points or are given heavy doses of flanger, chorus, or delay. Pay attention to quick snare or rimshot hits that are tightly reverberated with fast decaying delay.
