10 Classic Live Albums Enhanced with Studio Overdubs

It’s a well-known secret in the music industry that almost every live album released has undergone some level of overdubbing before it hits the shelves.

The question isn’t really whether a live LP has been overdubbed, but rather how much overdubbing has been done.

Even decades after the heyday of live albums, overdubbing remains a hot topic. To some fans, it’s considered a form of betrayal. However, other fans and many artists have come to view it as a necessary and inevitable part of the process.

Consider Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford. Known as one of the most revered metal vocalists of all time, even Halford engaged in overdubbing. He famously rerecorded all his vocals for Priest’s 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 of Kiss had a similar approach when the band released their breakthrough 1975 album Alive!. The band’s high-energy stage show didn’t always translate to technical perfection, so Alive! underwent a significant 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 extreme measures in the overdubbing process, others tried to preserve the integrity of their live performances as much as possible. This meant leaving the performances unaltered, only resorting to overdubbing when microphones failed to capture certain elements correctly.

It’s no surprise that artists are usually reluctant to disclose how much overdubbing went into their live recordings. The list of 10 Classic Live Albums That Were Overdubbed isn’t exhaustive, but in each of these cases, either band members or studio personnel have confirmed that post-performance corrections were made in the studio.

Live Albums That Were Overdubbed

They all have corrections — but some more than others.