isolating or highlighting vocal in muddy mix

[downonthestreet]

I have some old rehearsal cassette tapes of original songs I've transferred to my HD and have been messing around with in CEP. I am trying to discern the lyrics, but the vocals are way down, submerged beneath an onslaught of rehearsal room din of distorted guitar, drums etc. Is there any sort of setting within CEP that will likely bring down the other sounds and isolate or highlight the vocals so I can more easily discern the singer's lyrics, pls?

Cheers

[downonthestreet]

Anyone please?

[dobro]

Unless that old vocal is panned differently to all the rest of the stuff on the cassette, there's no way you can isolate it that I know of. (And if it's a rehearsal cassette, then it's not a mix, and so there's probably no panning at all.)

[downonthestreet]

Yes, you're quite right, Dobro. I knew there was no way of really isolating the vocal, given the nature of the rehearsal recording, but I thought there might be some extreme settings or some filter that would make the vocal stand out enough to have a better chance of discerning the lyrics. Probably, I've been watching too many cop shows that use hi-tech tools to do this sort of thing.

[dobro]

The cops can do it. You can't.

The problem is that the vocals completely share their frequency range with the guitars, so there's no way you can isolate them in terms of frequency. So the only hope would be if they were panned differently, which they're not. You know, if you have a mix with the vocals panned dead center and everything else panned way left or right, then you can sort so do some audio surgery and get them on their own, but otherwise...

[downonthestreet]

Yep, "otherwise" it is. Thanks anyway, Dobro.