Scientist

Hopeton Overton Brown (born 18 April 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a Jamaican recording engineer and producer who rose to fame in the 1980s mixing dub music as "Scientist". A protégé of King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), Scientist's contemporaries include several figures who, working at King Tubby's studio, had helped pioneer the genre in the 1970s: Ruddock, Bunny Lee, Philip Smart, Pat Kelly and Prince Jammy.

1970s: King Tubby's, Channel One, and Studio One

Scientist was introduced to electronics by his father, who worked as a television and radio repair technician. He began building his own amplifiers and would buy transformers from Tubby's Dromilly Road studio. While at the studio, the Scientist asked Tubby to give him a chance at mixing. He was taken on at Tubby's as an assistant, performing tasks such as winding transformer coils, and began working as a mixer in the mid-1970s, initially creating dubs of reworked Studio One tracks for Don Mais's Roots Tradition label, given his chance when Prince Jammy cut short a mixing session for Mais because he was too tired to continue. His name originated from a comment by Bunny Lee to King Tubby, with regard to his technical proficiency...

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