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Recording music at home on a budget is a very tricky task and can lead to frustration, anger, fits of uncontrollable tears, and violence towards your band mates. On the plus side though there is a lot of inexpensive equipment available nowadays that is targeted to the home studio market that can give you surprisingly good results in your recordings. I realise that the majority of people reading this will not have huge budgets to play with so I will keep the equipment I describe down to a bare minimum. I am also going to focus this article towards bands with guitars and live drums however the principles I describe will be equally applicable to electronic musicians and acoustic artists.

Probably the cheapest and easiest solution is to buy a portable "studio in a box". Examples of this are the Boss BR1600CD and Yamaha AW16G. These are devices that allow you to record multiple music tracks directly onto a hard disk and allow you to do a mixdown through its own menu driven system. I wouldn't advise getting anything below 16 tracks or you will not have enough, particularly if your guitarist wants to do overdubs. Also you want a machine that can record as many tracks as possible simultaneously. The machines at the lower end of the market tend to only let you record one or two tracks at the same time which will cause you problems when it comes to recording drums.

The way I would recommend you to record at home is to use a computer based system. While these are a little more expensive to set up you have the advantage of adding to your setup over time whereas with a "studio in a box" once you have bought it you are pretty limited in how you can expand it.

I will assume here you already have a computer and the good news is you wont need a new one. Most computers sold in the last few years are already powerful enough to run recording software but bear in mind the more complex your recordings then the more system resources they will use so faster is always better. You might want to think about setting your computer up as a dual boot system because if you also use your computer for the internet there will be all sorts of crap running in the background, slowing you down and making your playbacks jittery. You want a boot mode set up that is set up for music and nothing more.

Obviously you will need some recording software and Cubase is always a good option. Basically it does exactly what it says on the tin, the built in plugins aren't exactly world class but we're working to a

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