The Preset Nobody Heard

At Casio, her first assignment was to build the preset back tracks for the Casio's newest consumer keyboard, the Casiotone MT-40. Six rhythm patterns: rock, samba, disco, waltz, swing, pop. Each one needed a drum pattern, a bass line, and fill-ins. The whole process was a slog. You wrote a musical score, converted it into code, burned the code onto a ROM chip, slotted the chip, and only then could you actually hear the piece you'd written. Every iteration cost time.

The rock preset came out weird. Okuda has said in interviews since that her head in those days was just full of reggae, and even when she sat down to programme a rock beat she was sort of thinking about reggae anyway. So she kept the bass line simple, uncluttered, the kind of thing that would sit nicely under the off-beat chords she loved in reggae records. She filed it under 'rock.' The keyboard shipped. She moved on.

In the middle of 1984, George 'Buddy' Haye went on tour in the States with the Wailing Souls, the roots reggae group he'd been part of since the mid-70s. Before he left Kingston he made a promise to a young musician named Noel Davey. He'd buy him a synthesizer in America and bring it home.

Davey had been recommended to Haye by Rudolph 'Garth' Dennis, the Wailing Souls frontman, as an up-and-coming talent worth backing. The synth Davey was expecting was a Yamaha DX7, the professional-grade instrument that was rewiring studios all over the world in the early 80s. The DX7 retailed for $1,995 in 1984. Almost fourteen times the cost of an MT-40.

Buddy came home with an MT-40. A consumer keyboard. 37 keys, 22 preset sounds, six rhythm patterns, and a little dedicated bass keyboard on the left side. Not programmable. Not a synthesizer in any meaningful sense, really just a playback box (like a sampler) for sounds someone else had already recorded.

Somewhere in the messing around, Davey accidentally triggered the rock preset's bass pattern. He heard it for a few seconds, this low, digital, pulsing thing unlike anything in reggae at the time, and then the setting flipped and the rhythm cut out.

He couldn't remember what he'd pressed.

So he brought in Wayne Smith, a young singer from Waterhouse who'd been recording for Prince Jammy since 1980 and had put out his debut album, Youthman Skanking, in 1982. The two of them spent the better part of the next week pressing every combination of buttons on the MT-40 trying to get the sound back.

The sequence has been confirmed since. Hit the synchro button, then the D bass button, second from the left on the little bass keyboard, with the rhythm slider in the rock position. And here's the thing, it can't be triggered after the rhythm function has already started. That's why it took them so long. The order had to be exactly right, and it had to happen before play began.

When they finally got it back, they knew. Smith wrote lyrics over the riddim, taking some inspiration from Barrington Levy's 1983 hit 'Under Mi Sensi,' and the two of them put together a first version of the track. Faster than what would eventually come out.

Lloyd 'King Jammy' James had come up under King Tubby, one of the founding figures of dub, and had built his own studio in Washington Gardens, Kingston. When Davey and Smith showed up with the MT-40 and played him the riddim in December 1984, Jammy said later he knew right away they had something.

He slowed the preset down to a reggae tempo, matched it to Smith's vocal key, and laid piano and handclap tracks over the top. That became 'Under Mi Sleng Teng,' a song about marijuana, partly making fun of cocaine use, with lyrics that sat on the riddim like they'd been built for it.

Jammy also cut Tenor Saw on the same backing track ('Pumpkin Belly') and Johnny Osbourne ('Buddy Bye') before the song ever went public.

The first time anyone heard 'Under Mi Sleng Teng' in public was at a sound clash between King Jammy's sound system and Black Scorpio at Waltham Park Road in Kingston, on the night of 23 February 1985. Black Scorpio had brought heavy dubplates: Frankie Paul, General Trees, Sassafras, Culture Lee. By most accounts they were winning.

Then Jammy's selector Tupps put the Sleng Teng dubplate on the turntable and dropped the needle. The crowd lost it. Jammy won the clash on the spot, the audience demanding the track again and again. Nothing in Jamaican music had sounded like it before. Fully digital, no live instruments, that pulsing preset bassline running underneath Smith's vocal.

Within weeks 'Under Mi Sleng Teng' was climbing the UK reggae charts. Within months, copy-cat digital riddims were pouring out of Jamaican studios. The era of live instrumentation in Jamaican music was basically over. Session musicians who'd spent years at studios like Channel One found their skills suddenly worth nothing.

Hiroko Okuda was at work when she read the article. It ran in the August 1986 edition of Japan's Music Magazine under the title 'The Sleng Teng Flood,' and it described how a preset rhythm from a Casiotone keyboard was taking Jamaican music by storm. Dozens upon dozens of reggae songs, all built on a pattern from a consumer keyboard that retailed for ¥35,000.

She knew immediately. The preset was hers. She'd written it in her first weeks at Casio, six years earlier, thinking about reggae.

She bought the 'Under Mi Sleng Teng' record and listened to it. In her first ever radio interview, given to BBC Outlook more than forty years after the fact, she described the moment as feeling like a boomerang coming back. The music she'd loved and studied had travelled from Tokyo to Kingston and returned to her as a flood. She said she got quite emotional.

There was, around that time, some discussion inside Casio about whether to go after the unlicensed use of their IP in the song. Toshio Kashio, co-founder of the company and head of the Musical Instrument division, was decisive about it. Casio's mission was to bring the joy of playing music to everyone. No lawsuit. To this day, Casio's response to any clearance request for the rock preset is just an acknowledgement that the song uses a sound from a Casio MT-40, and no fee.

The Sleng Teng riddim has spawned nearly 500 versions. Its DNA runs through ragga, jungle, drum and bass, and grime. Scholars Peter Manuel and Wayne Marshall have argued that it fundamentally changed how riddims were built, moving the form away from leaning on vintage B-side tracks and toward short digital ostinatos that any producer with a keyboard and a sequencer could put together from scratch. The whole idea of the bedroom studio in Jamaican music, and arguably in British club music too, basically starts here.

King Jammy updated the riddim in 2005, speeding it up a touch and adding a horn riff. That version is known as 'Sleng Teng Resurrection.' Casio brought the rock preset back in 2010 in their SA-46 and SA-76 keyboards, this time labelled outright as 'MT40 Riddim.' Wayne Smith died in Kingston on 17 February 2014, aged 48. George 'Buddy' Haye, whose tour and broken DX7 promise set the whole thing off, eventually stepped back from music.

Hiroko Okuda still works at Casio. She holds more than a dozen patents in electronic musical instruments. Her thesis on reggae, written at Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo before most of the Western music press had taken the genre seriously, sits somewhere in an archive. The keyboard she programmed in her first weeks on the job has been discontinued for decades. But the bassline she wrote in an afternoon, thinking about reggae when she was supposed to be thinking about rock, is still out there. Still being versioned. Still the foundation of something.

She said it felt almost inevitable. In a way, she was right.