It’s a music-industry open secret that virtually every live album to hit shelves has been overdubbed before release.
The question, then, is not whether a live LP contains overdubs — but how many.
Decades after the halcyon days of live albums, overdubbing remains a controversial topic. To some fans, it’s no less than an act of betrayal. But other fans — and artists — have come to accept it as an inevitable and necessary practice.
Take Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford, for example. Despite being one of the most revered metal 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 in 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. “Because that would have been cheating them far more.”
Paul Stanley had a similar philosophy when Kiss released their breakthrough 1975 Alive! album. The band’s off-the-wall stage show didn’t exactly lend itself to technical perfection, so Alive! underwent an extensive overdubbing process. “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 process to extremes, others did everything in their power to maintain the integrity of their live show. That meant leaving the unaltered performances on record whenever possible, opting to overdub only when the microphones failed to capture something properly.
Unsurprisingly, artists are not always keen to disclose just how much overdubbing went into their live recordings. The following list of 10 Classic Live Albums That Were Overdubbed is far from exhaustive, but in each case, band members or studio personnel have gone on record to confirm that corrections were made in the studio after the house lights went up at the venue.
Live Albums That Were Overdubbed
They all have corrections — but some more than others.
Gallery Credit: Bryan Rolli