overdubbing

In music production, the practice of having a singer sing along with him/herself, by recording different parts on different tracks.

This is different from double tracking, in that in overdubbing, the singer sings something different on each track, while in double tracking, each track is sung in an identical manner as possible.

Electricsound: My understanding is that Jazz albums are generally recorded in one take, even in the studio.

The technique of overdubbing can apply to any sounds added to a recording at any point after the initial "live" instruments or sounds have been tracked to multi-track tape (or disk).

It is virtually unheard of nowadays for a commercially released recording to contain no overdubs whatsoever (excepting of course most "live in concert"-type albums).

bitter_engineer: Fair point about Jazz albums. My generalisation above does fall down slightly when dealing with largely instrumental music.

Overdubbing is the worst kind of movie censorship, in that it both patronizes the audience and insults their intelligence. When you're watching an R-rated movie and someone cusses, the censors usually have a preassembled arsenal of substitute words to dub over the cussing, sometimes in the original actor's voice, or someone who sounds like them. Such substitute words include, but are not limited to: Darn, heck, shoot, freakin, frickin, etc. The part that really bothers me about overdubbing is that only a child who has never even heard the words being substituted won't know what they're really saying. And for that matter, what is your toddler doing watching Die Hard on TBS anyway?

I prefer my censorship straight up, with just the profanity blanked out. "-------You, you------in-----" sounds way better than "Freak You, you Frickin Frick!", because people just don't talk like that. If the network is going to overtly declare that you are incapable of handling profanity in your programming, fine, I can go rent a video or whatever, but don't shit in my cornflakes and tell me it's raining, or however the saying goes. Either leave the profanity in, or take it out. But to take it out and then try to cover up the fract that you took it out demeans the programmers and the viewers.