Originally Posted by: earthman buckYou kids and your fancy recording. We're the Greasy Knots! All we need is blankets and water-bottles!

What fancy stuff?
For the PhaseIV album all I used was a $100 mic, a cheap Behringer mixer a cheazy $50 acoustic and a Gibson L6S.
Everything else was self contained in the comptuter (a 10 year old Mac G3 with a 60mhz processor and 700mb ram. Most of the software you can get as freeware like reverbs etc...
The only thing that cost money was the synths and you can use loops from a place like Peace Love Productions that are only about $6 each.
And Cubase, again, you can get something a lot cheaper if you don't need 128 tracks.

It's all in how you use it. Instead of micing all your drums, use a bunch of loops, then use the real kit to fill in the cymbals and tom rolls.
When you record the bass, put lots of compression on it.
For the guitar, go straight line in and get Amplitube or if you can't afford that, spend a bunch of time messing around with mic placement and keep the volume down.

If you absolutely must record live, just do a scratch version first, then redo each instrument seperately until you get perfect takes.

Last but not least, take a whole bunch of time mixing and mastering.
Again, you can get freeware stuff for doing compression.

Seriously dood, if you don't know any of this stuff just read through the tutorials. There's tons of pics and audio examples showing how a song progresses.