Date:    Mon, 23 Mar 1998 10:25:07 -0500
<br>From:    Gregory {Greg} Downing  downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: RE dubbing
<br>
<br>At 09:58 AM 3/23/98 -0500, Grant Barrett wrote:
<br> Guesswork and thoughts on "dubbing":
<br> 
<br> 1. It's been five years since I worked in radio, but the term "dubbing" is
<br>omnipresent there, to mean "making a copy to magnetic tape." The source
<br>media is irrelevant, as long it's not live. If it's live, you're just taping
<br>or recording it.
<br> 
<br>
<br>I knew folks in radio and the recording biz in college in the later 70s;
<br>"dub" was already well-established then (Ann Arbor, MI).
<br>
<br>
<br> 2. I now work in advertising, and my peers seem to use "dubbing" to mean
<br>"make an exact copy from one tape to another" usally referring to video.
<br>Side note: they still use "reel" to indicate an archive of television
<br>commercials we've done, even though they are now stored on half-inch or
<br>three-quarter video cassettes rather than film reels.
<br> 
<br>
<br>I suppose everyone knows that "dub" is short for "double" -- at least, that
<br>was the way it was explained to me, and so saith OED2.
<br>
<br>
<br> 4. Reggae music has an interesting use of the word "dubbing" to mean
<br>something like "freestyle rhyming over a beat track or repeated musical
<br>theme." This is more likely to be found in "dancehall reggae" and
<br>"ragamuffin." See the works of Lee Scratch Perry whose "dub beats" are hard
<br>to top.
<br> 
<br>
<br>This maybe grows out of the idea of "overdubbing," which is a recording term
<br>for building up and fleshing out a piece of recorded music by adding
<br>multiple tracks on the same tape or on the same soundboard. It's the kind of
<br>technique you see on (e.g.) Phil Spector records from the early sixties, and
<br>became a standard technique on almost all pop recordings from the mid/later
<br>60s onwards (64-track recording, etc.). The reggae term is a specialization
<br>of the earlier idea.
<br>
<br>
<br> 5. I have a feeling (whoop! whoop! guess alert!) that we're not talking
<br>about a case of back-borrowing here. If we could get ahold of a user's
<br>manual from any dual-deck magnetic tape device from the early days of the
<br>technology, I suspect we will find the word "dub" in some form there.
<br> 
<br>
<br>Yes, I would suspect "dub" as a music-creation technique goes back to at
<br>least the fifties; you can hear the technique on a number of recordings from
<br>that period. As a term for simple copying of a recording, who knows how far
<br>back it goes? OED dub v.5 has a first cite from 1929. The word is used for a
<br>number of different copying techniques in the various OED cites.
<br>
<br>Greg Downing/NYU, at greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu
<br>