Hi Stuart. The most important thing is a good set of microphones. I have a set of condenser microphones from Marshall Electronics (Pro Microphone Package with a MXL2001 vocal and a MXL603S instrument mic, and Case for $250 at SameDay Music Co.). These are a great value and I find the quality quite good. With these condenser mics you need a pre-amp and phantom power source - I have a Behringer 2-channel MIC2200 Ultragain Pro ($110 at SameDay Music Co.). I also have a 4-track cassette porta-studio which I use as a mixer, etc. Recently I added a NOMAD JUKEBOX 3, 20 GB MP3 player. That is the only one I know of that records in wav format and can upload wav files directly into my computer. I picked one up at an incredibly low discounted price since it's an older model and not popular due to its larger size (about the size of a portable CD player). With the MP3 player I can record wav files in stereo for many hours (most of a day) without running out of memory, and it beats changing tapes every 15 min and keeps everything digital. And all of this fits reasonably into a small box so it's fairly portable. Once in the computer, I edit the wav files, adjust eq and reverb, etc with CoolEdit which is now Adobe Audition (or there are other less costly programs available).

Cheers, S. in Seattle