Initially these acetates would simply be the standard recording of a song that wasn't yet released on a single, but around 1968-69 they started to be exclusive mixes with some or all of the vocal mixed out, as described by producer Bunny Lee: It was in this sense that the term was first used in the Jamaican recording industry: new recordings were often initially copied onto one-off acetate discs, known colloquially as soft wax or dub and later as dubplates, for exclusive use by sound system operators playing a song as an exclusive recording on a sound system was a good way for a producer to test the potential popularity of a recording before committing to the pressing of hundreds or thousands of copies of singles for retail sale.

Over the next 40 years or so the term found its way into audio recording in general, often in the context of making a copy of a recording on another tape or disc. The use of the word dub in a recording context originated in the late 1920s with the advent of 'talking pictures' and referred to adding a soundtrack to a film it is an informal abbreviation of the word double. 4.2 Influence of dub on punk and rock music.3.2 Evolution of dub as a subgenre (1970s).3.1 'Versions' and experiments with studio mixing (Late 1960s).Traditional dub has survived, and some of the originators such as Mad Professor, continue to produce new material. Dub has become a basis for the genres of jungle and drum and bass. Дub has influenced many genres of music, including rock (most significantly the subgenre of post-punk and other kinds of punk ), pop, hip hop, post-disco, and later house, techno, ambient, electronic dance music, and trip hop. The Roland Space Echo was widely used by dub producers in the 1970s to produce echo and delay effects. These producers, especially Ruddock and Perry, looked upon the mixing console as an instrument, manipulating tracks to come up with something new and different. Similar experiments with recordings at the mixing desk outside the dancehall environment were also done by producers Clive Chin and Herman Chin Loy.

Augustus Pablo is credited with bringing the melodica to dub, and is also among the pioneers and creators of the genre. Дub was pioneered by recording engineers and producers such as Osbourne 'King Tubby' Ruddock, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Errol Thompson and others beginning in the late 1960s. It was an early form of popular electronic music. The style consists predominantly of partly or completely instrumental remixes of existing recordings and is achieved by significantly manipulating and reshaping the recordings, usually through the removal of some or all of the vocals, emphasis of the rhythm section (the stripped-down drum-and-bass track is sometimes referred to as a riddim), the application of studio effects such as echo and reverb, and the occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works. Dub is a genre of electronic music that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae.

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