Perhaps the most wide-reaching collaborative overdub recording was accomplished by Eric Whitacre in 2013, where he edited together a "Virtual Choir" of 8,409 audio tracks from 5,905 people from 101 countries.
[6] The 1946 Disney animated film Make Mine Music includes overdubbed duo and trio performances by Nelson Eddy as an opera singing whale.
[7] The 1950 Disney film Cinderella used multiple tracks for vocals for the song "Oh, Sing Sweet Nightingale".
The invention of magnetic tape opened up new possibilities for overdubbing, particularly with the development of multitrack recording with sel-sync.
[11] His 1950 #1 hit, "How High The Moon", performed with his then-wife Mary Ford, featured a then-significant amount of overdubbing, along with other studio techniques such as flanging, delay, phasing and vari-speed.
[13] Peter Ustinov performed multiple voices on "Mock Mozart", in a recording produced by George Martin.
Martin used the same process later for a Peter Sellers comedy record, this time using stereo machines and panning.
[citation needed] Ross Bagdasarian, also known as David Seville, combined overdubbing with tape speed manipulation to create "The Chipmunk Song," performing the voices of all three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, recorded to a half-normal-speed playback of the instrumental backup; and conversing with the singing rodents in his own voice, recorded at full speed.
Overdubbing has sometimes been viewed negatively, when it is seen as being used to artificially enhance the musical skills of an artist or group, such as with studio-recorded inserts to live recordings, or backing tracks created by session musicians instead of the credited performers.
[14] Additionally, in working with producer Butch Vig, Kurt Cobain had expressed a disdain for double-track recording.
[17] Paulinho da Costa's song "Ritmo Number One" from his 1977 album "Agora" uses a base track with surdo (big bass drum) and percussion, overdubbed with 8 percussion tracks (repique, pandeiro, congas, tamborims, a-go-go, cuíca, bell tree, reco-reco).