Full disclosure: I don't actually listen to a lot of dub reggae records. The staggering number of albums out there bearing the imprint of genius producers like King Tubby, Scientist, and Lee "Scratch" Perry is a little intimidating. My love of the dub siren sound ACTUALLY came from listening to a TON of early jungle records in the mid 90's - where dub was one of the most common sample sources.
However - even a quick perusal of dub tunes will reveal two things: 1) a love of effects like tape delay, spring reverb, and filtering, and 2) a DIY aesthetic that was born on an island where the access to gear was limited and interest from outsiders was not really a concern - at least not at first, anyway...
So much of the gear these folks used was repurposed from old military equipment, or just straight up built from scratch using whatever parts they had. The high pass filtering from a passive box that King Tubby constructed and used A LOT is just such an example of this. As is the "dub siren" - which is basically a single-oscillator drone synth with some really wild tweakability.
This is the layout for one of those synthesizers that I adapted from a schematic that was originally drawn by Jacob Lysgaard. The majority of the conversion to stripboard was done by Nabble/Guitar FX user Alex80.
I simplified a few of the functions, eliminated a couple of the switches, rewired a couple of the pots and also added a power cut function to the siren on/off switch - because otherwise noise WILL bleed through.
The end result is VERIFIED, and will give you some pretty nasty siren-ish sounds. This thing has a really wide pitch range and is super loud with the volume maxed. The mod rate and shape knobs will have no effect when the mod level knob is fully counter clockwise, effectively turning the modulation off. I'll include the original schematic at the end of this post, but it contains quite a lot of stuff that I eliminated or changed, including two different LEDs for bypass status and modulation rate following.
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