World of Jamaican Music

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An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

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Sound Dimension

Band. Rocksteady, reggae

Active
1968-1974

Sound Dimension was the Soul Vendors renamed, and the Studio One house band from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. The name came from a piece of studio equipment, the echo unit Eric Frater had brought back from the band's 1967 English tour.

The personnel were largely carried over and kept changing. Jackie Mittoo was the keyboard player and director until he left for Canada in 1968, after which Robbie Lyn and Richard Ace usually took the seat and Mittoo returned for sessions. Leroy Sibbles played bass while he was also singing lead with the Heptones, and arranged a great deal of what the band recorded; Boris Gardiner and Brian "Bassie" Atkinson also played bass. Frater and Ernest Ranglin played guitar, Joe Isaacs, Fil Callender, Bunny Williams and Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace the drums, and the horns were Vin Gordon, Cedric "Im" Brooks, Headley Bennett and Karl Bryan, with Denzil Laing on percussion.

They opened with "Walk Don't Run," "Swing Easy" and "Drum Song" in 1967 and followed with a run of instrumentals in 1968: "Mojo Rocksteady," "Musical Scorcher," "Heavy Rock," "African Chant" and "Rockfort Rock." Many of these were instrumental cuts of the label's vocal sides, and Dodd reworked a number of them again in the second half of the 1970s for a younger audience.

Two of them outlived everything else the band did. "Full Up" is the riddim under the Mighty Diamonds' "Pass the Kouchie" and, through it, Musical Youth's "Pass the Dutchie." "Real Rock" has been versioned more often than any other riddim in Jamaican music; Willie Williams cut "Armagideon Time" on it, and the Clash covered that in turn.

Last updated October 14, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. The Rough Guide has the band recording "usually" as Sound Dimension "from late 1967 until Mittoo's departure for Canada in 1968." Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 90. Bradley still calls the Studio One house band the Soul Vendors when Dodd was issuing instrumental cuts of his early reggae hits after "the end of 1968." Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 313. Jo-Ann Greene, as quoted by the blog undergroundundercovered, says the band's music "defined the age for five years, from 1968 until 1972." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One w/ Undercover," undergroundundercovered (blog), May 6, 2019, http://undergroundundercovered.blogspot.com/2019/05/sound-dimension-studio-one-w-undercover.html.
  2. Greene, as quoted: "The group toured Britain in 1967, and guitarist Eric Frater returned home with an echo box." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One." The Rough Guide says the band was "named after an echo unit favoured by Frater," and the engineer Sylvan Morris credits Frater's guitar sound to "a piece of equipment called the Sound Dimension." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 90, 233. Bradley says Dodd himself had "recently imported from the UK" the delay echo unit heard on his guitar parts. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 200.
  3. The Rough Guide says Mittoo "first left for Toronto in 1968." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 96. Greene, as quoted: "Robbie Lyn or Richard Ace usually took his seat, although the keyboardist returned regularly for recording sessions." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One."
  4. The Rough Guide says Sibbles learned bass under Mittoo, first playing it "in a jazz trio led by Mittoo during early 1967," and that his bass lines drove most of the band's classic rhythms. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 68-69, 90. Bradley says Sibbles "edged Jackie Mittoo to one side as the man in charge of the music at Studio One" and was responsible "for the sound and feel of so much of that classic catalogue." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 215.
  5. Wikipedia lists Gardiner and Atkinson among the band's bass players. "Sound Dimension," Wikipedia, accessed October 5, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Dimension. It credits Gardiner, not Sibbles, with the bass on "Real Rock," citing Greene and a 2004 New York Times article by Rob Kenner. "Real Rock," Wikipedia, accessed October 5, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Rock. The Rough Guide says "Real Rock" was among the rhythms "driven by Sibbles' basslines." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 69.
  6. The Rough Guide names Frater on guitar, Bunny Williams on drums, and Headley Bennett and Cedric Brooks on saxophones, with Ranglin and Lennie Hibbert sitting in. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 90. Greene adds Horsemouth Wallace and Vin Gordon. "Sound Dimension @ Studio One." The other names are from Wikipedia. "Sound Dimension."
  7. The Rough Guide dates "Real Rock," "Drum Song," "Swing Easy" and "Psychedelic Rock" to 1967. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 69. "Drum Song" appeared as a Soul Vendors single in Britain in 1967. "The Cool Spoon / Soul Vendors - Yakety Yak / Drum Song," Discogs, accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/release/3453103. Greene dates "Drum Song" to 1969, "initially released and credited to the Soul Vendors." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One."
  8. Greene, as quoted, gives this list. "Sound Dimension @ Studio One." The Rough Guide singles out "Full Up" and "Mojo Rocksteady" from the period between late 1967 and 1968, and names "the New Establishment's 'Rockfort Rock'" on a Studio One compilation. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 90, 127.
  9. Greene: "Later in the decade, Coxsone Dodd dusted off a number of the Dimension's tracks and remodeled them for a new generation." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One." Bradley says Dodd devoted "the large part of his energies" in the second half of the 1970s "to re-releasing his back catalogue." Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 351.
  10. The Rough Guide says the Mighty Diamonds' "Pass the Kouchie" for Gussie Clarke "brought the 'Full Up' rhythm back into favour in 1981," and that Musical Youth "cleaned up on the global market with a weaker cut of the rhythm." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 285, 288.
  11. Greene, as quoted: "More versions have been cut on 'Real Rock' than on any other in reggae history." "Sound Dimension @ Studio One." The Rough Guide calls it, more narrowly, the most versioned of Studio One's instrumentals. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 167-68.
  12. Riddimguide lists Willie Williams's "Armagideon Time" (Studio One, 1979) on the "Real Rock" rhythm. "armagideon," search results, Riddimguide, accessed October 5, 2026, https://www.riddimguide.com/tunes?q=armagideon. The Clash issued their cover in 1979 as the B-side of "London Calling." "Armagideon Time," Wikipedia, accessed October 5, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armagideon_Time.

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