Dub | Med Dred

Irie Magazine 02-01 - Reggae - Dub - Med Dred
Dub | Med Dred 1

IRIE. Did you study/practice any instruments as a youth?

Med Dred: Yes… (Med Dred plays the keys) piano. I went up to grade 5. I started piano from the age of 10-11 as soon as I entered high school. But there was an incident (chuckle), a small incident because I was in a rough school in Brixton. This school was the roughest school in South London. There was crime going on in the school. Anyway, the teacher at the school was teaching us some basic stuff. They would just leave us in a practice room with a grand piano. Me and another student who I didn’t really like in my classroom. We ended up having a fight and the fire extinguisher went off and it flooded the whole room. I was banned from piano so I had to wait for a few years until I left that school. I continued on my own at home. I didn’t have a piano so I got myself a midi keyboard (one of the first ones) that connected to a sampler which I was playing at home on my own. I also played on my computer keys to trigger samples.

I had a private piano teacher as a youth all the way up to grade 5. I used to read sheet music and even play classical music. I don’t play classical music or remember sheet music anymore and that’s because my focus shifted. I told my piano teacher to just show me where all the jazz chords are and show me some transitions. That’s all I want and I’m going to stop. I’m just going to play more freely now by ear. I don’t want to play by the basic rule. I rather play more freely. I also play drums, percussion and of course the Melodica.

IRIE. You studied Sound Engineering in the UK. You also have a Bachelor’s Degree (Texas) and a Master’s Degree (Trinity Southern University – UK). The education behind your music process can be felt! Was it important for you to further your studies in sound engineering? Med Dred.

Med Dred: Let me tell you…when I first started my certificate, City & Guilds, before I even went to that school, I had a Commodore Amiga A500 at the time which I still possess. And I had an 8-bit sampler, the first ones that were available to the public. Forget about Paul Hardcastle and his EMAX E-III Emulator that was costing thousands, out of the reach of the working class. Just to get my Amiga, I washed dishes. My parents were into the catering business and had a restaurant. I think I washed 10,000 plates to get that Amiga.

Once I had that, I kept up to date with the Future Music magazine that were coming out. I still have issue #1. They came with a CD. I still have a whole big collection. I collected the first twenty issues and they were full of samples. Few people had an Akai Sampler. I didn’t’ have one at the time. All I had was my Amiga. I had a vinyl deck player. I had a Marantz tape deck and and a couple of speakers whilst I was studying. I was renting a little room at the top of a restaurant.

To break it all down, from reading all the magazines and studying all this, before I even had a studio, I knew how to set it all up. I had it all in my head. I knew what everything did. I knew what midi was before I even used midi. I knew what timecode was before I used timecode. I knew how to sync up tape machines with computers and Atari ST’s. I didn’t have an Atari ST but I had a better computer. I had an Amiga which was slightly better.

The good thing about the Atari ST was that it had Notator Logic. It had these other programs which were the predecessors to Logic and Cubase. I had the midi expanders on my Atari ST which gave me 4 midi inputs that allowed you to input four synthesizers and use 64 midi channels. I also owned a Roland W30 Sampler which was 12-bit.

To get into my university, I didn’t even have a high school certificate. That didn’t matter. All I had was this audio tape of mash up mixes that I made, remixes of jungle and hardcore rave music that was totally underground at the time. We’re going back to 1992 now. It was just rave music, pre-drum and bass. It was the early days. It was called rave music and it was only heard at raves, pirate radio and certain underground places all over the UK. I was into that sound because it was very current and very underground. There was nothing dirtier and nothing harder than that and it used reggae vocal samples with a dirty bass. That drum and bass beat came out of dub anyway… from King Tubby flinging the delays on some hi-hats and re chops.


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