Vocals over powered by guitar

Hi all, I’m new here and hoping for some help

I have a recording of vocals and guitar which sounded great when being performed live (proper microphone used with vocals and guitar being fed in to a mixer on separate channels etc). Sadly, it was recorded from the mixer in to a cheap dictaphone.

It sounds pretty rubbish and the guitar is overpowering the vocals. There are also sounds of air movement, breath hitting the mic etc.

It’s a single audio track, rather than separate music/vocals. It was also recorded in mono but I’ve had a go at converting it to stereo by duplicating the one channel and delaying it by a few milliseconds in Audacity. I believe this is called the “Haas effect”?

Is it possible to clean this up at all?

I’ve had a look though the “Vocal Removal and Isolation” tutorial but I’m not sure if it will work for what I’m hoping to do. It’s based on a proper stereo recording for a start.

Reading between the lines, I think you already know the answer, but you are hoping that you are wrong, Sorry, but I doubt that much can be done. You could try messing with the Equalization effect - that may give you some marginal improvement http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/equalization.html

If it was true stereo there would have been a chance of removing or isolating the vocal, but as it’s mono then no-go.

Cheers guys.

I thought that might be the case but it’s nice to have it confirmed. I’ve had a poke about with the equaliser but it didn’t help much - I won’t waste any more time on this recording!

I’ll try and get my boss to invest better recording equipment. I don’t see the point in having a proper mixer and input set up without a decent way to record the output