Vibe Merchants: The Sound Creators of Jamaican Popular Music

Ray Hitchins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

Vibe Merchants offers an insider's perspective on the development of Jamaican Popular Music, researched and analysed by a thirty-year veteran with a wide range of experience in performance, production and academic study. This rare perspective, derived from interviews and ethnographic methodologies, focuses on the actual details of music-making practice, rationalized in the context of the economic and creative forces that locally drive music production. By focusing on the work of audio engineers and musicians, recording studios and recording models, Ray Hitchins highlights a music creation methodology that has been acknowledged as being different to that of Europe and North America. The book leads to a broadening of our understanding of how Jamaican Popular Music emerged, developed and functions, thus providing an engaging example of the important relationship between music, technology and culture that will appeal to a wide range of scholars.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Jamaica’s First Recording Studio
• 2 The Demand for New Styles of Recorded Music
• 3 Establishing an Internationally Competitive Recording Model
• 4 Establishing a Jamaican Sound
• 5 The 1970s–80s: A Period of Dramatic Change
• 6 Drum Machines and Synthesizers: The Serial Recording Model
• 7 The Riddim Production Method: The Audio Engineer as Music Arranger
• 8 Computer-based Recording and the Multi-role Producer in the 1990s
• 9 A Jamaican Recording Studio Ethnography
• Conclusion
• Appendix A Recording Models
• Appendix B Interviewee List
• Appendix C Glossary of Music-related Terms
• Select Bibliography
• Index