It’s a music-industry open secret that just about each dwell album to hit cabinets has been overdubbed earlier than launch.

The query, then, is just not whether or not a dwell LP accommodates overdubs — however what number of.

Decades after the halcyon days of dwell albums, overdubbing stays a controversial matter. To some followers, it is at least an act of betrayal. But different followers — and artists — have come to just accept it as an inevitable and needed follow.

Take Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford, for instance. Despite being one of the revered steel vocalists of all time, even Halford was not above overdubbing, and he notoriously rerecorded all of his vocals on Priest’s beloved 1979 album Unleashed within the East. “We hadn’t tried to cheat our fans: we just wouldn’t release an inferior Priest product,” Halford wrote in his 2020 memoir Confess. (*10*)

Paul Stanley had the same philosophy when KISS launched their breakthrough 1975 Alive! album. The band’s off-the-wall stage present did not precisely lend itself to technical perfection, so Alive! underwent an in depth overdubbing course of. “Yes, we enhanced it – not to hide anything, not to fool anyone,” Stanley admitted in his 2014 autobiography Face the Music: A Life Exposed. “But who wanted to hear a mistake repeated endlessly? Who wanted to hear an out-of-tune guitar? For what? Authenticity?”

While some artists took the overdubbing course of to extremes, others did all the things of their energy to keep up the integrity of their dwell present. That meant leaving the unaltered performances on document at any time when potential, opting to overdub solely when the microphones did not seize one thing correctly.

Unsurprisingly, artists aren’t at all times eager to reveal simply how a lot overdubbing went into their dwell recordings. The following checklist of 10 Classic Live Albums That Were Overdubbed is way from exhaustive, however in every case, band members or studio personnel have gone on document to verify that corrections had been made within the studio after the home lights went up on the venue.