You had a limitation of tracks, too. You were lucky if you had two tracks and you could do an alternative take.
You know what people do now when they want me to overdub on a record? They'll send an album with a mix, and I have like 22 open tracks of guitars I can put down. So now you are going to figure out what my part is.Rogers described his experience working with Michael Jackson. Say what you will about Jackson's personal life, or his music, but there's no doubt that the guy works with zillion dollar recording budgets. But when I can report similar examples based on recording on a PC in my den, it's obvious that it's becoming increasingly easy--heck, virtually effortless--to assemble a solo or vocal part after the artist leaves, like a film editor, rather than trying to get a complete, perfect, magic take. The next step (and to be honest, I'm long overdue in trying it) is simply playing a bunch of links, converting them to Acid-style loops, and "writing" a solo that way. Frank Zappa once described his method of playing "the Ampex guitar", where'd he'd take recordings of live solos he did on tour, and paste them into studio recordings, for a better feel than he felt he could get from a solo recorded in a studio, but this stuff is like the Ampeg guitar solo taken to the nth degree.
Destroying the Last Bastion of Honesty
As Friedman wrote, Milli Vanilli got into lots of hot water because their producer didn't bother putting their own voices on a recording with their name on it. In some respects, vocals, (and to a lesser extent instrumental solos) are the last bastion of expected honesty in recording. The Beatles started the ball rolling, by creating Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club, an album full of overdubbed sound effects, backwards tape loops, and for its climax (pun not intentional-honest!), bringing in a symphony orchestra to create the "giant orgasm of sound" (as producer George Martin has described it) on "A Day In The Life". Having retired from touring, they deliberately set out to make an album that would be unplayable on stage. By the late 1960s, Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page were overdubbing layers and layers of guitars to produce sounds that they knew they could never reproduce onstage.
And overdubbing, since at least the 1950s, has long been a way to camouflage mistakes on a recording, in very much the same way that multiple takes allow for mistakes in a movie or TV show to be eliminated. The result is (ideally) a product that can stand up to repeated listening, with no mistakes to take away from the recording.
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