Hey man....I'll give you a breakdown of everything I own to make music. But you have to be aware, that there is a HUGE learning curve to home recording...and until you get proficient with your DAW and learning about all sorts of settings and how to set up your audio and workflow and what cable gets plugged into where and yadda yadda, you will find that there are days where it can get aggravating. And then once you finally get the hang of it, and you can record something with somewhat ease, you will find that it sounds like garbage, and then you realize you gotta learn all about mixing, and the struggles that comes with.

So first and foremost, just make sure you are aware that even if you had all the money in the world, it's going to take a good chunk of time before you feel comfortable and etc.

BUT,

here is a list of everything that should help you get started.



I assume you're a guitarist yeah?

First off, just buy the full version of Reaper. It's $60. It's worth it.
Also, for drums, I use Steven Slate Drums...The full kit is worth it..but if you want just the $40 version, that will work also.

For an audio interface, the best quality/bang for your buck would probably be something from Focusrite

And then you will need a set of monitors as well....again, the best quality/bang for your buck IMO is a set of these

And then of course you're going to need things like cables, etc.

XLR cables for mics,

balanced cables for connecting things like your interface to your monitors, etc,

get some instrument cables as well if you don't already have some,

A good surge protector as well, can't recommend this one enough, it has rotating sockets so you can fit everything on it.



From then, its just a matter of how much money you want to spend, and what all you want to do.

How do you plan to get your guitar tone. Are you going to mic a cab? If so, look into something like an SM57. If you wanna do it the cheap/free way, be warned you will be dealing with a latency issue. USB interfaces have latency, so monitoring your tone can cause some issues sometimes. You plug in your guitar raw straight into the interface, and throw on some plugins on the track that give you your tone. If you want to hear just a raw, clean guitar, there won't be any latency. But if you want to record while hearing your distortion, the computer has to take your clean signal, process it through the plugins, and then back out to the monitors, so there will be a split second of latency if you don't have things set up correctly and if your pc specs arent up to par..and even so, you never can truly get to 0 latency without spending some SERIOUS money.

If you have some extra money, I would highly recommending getting something like this eleven rack...I personally use this. You can bypass the latency issue by choosing what you monitor on the interface...do you want to monitor what is coming from the input (the eleven rack) or the playback (the computer) or a blend of both. So essentially i can just listen to my guitar live as I'm recording straight from the Eleven Rack, but i'm not acutally 'monitoring' it in Reaper. By doing so, my guitar doesn't have to travel through the computer and back out, thus no latency. You can really get some great tones out of this thing also...I like to call it the 'Poor Man's AxeFX'. Here's an example of something i'm working on...both using the eleven rack and the steven slate drums, so you can get a sense of the quality of the drums and guitar tone. I have done some slight eq'ing and stuff, but nothing dramatic.

Of course you don't need something like that for guitar, there are plenty of plug ins that are free that can help you with tone.

And lastly, as far as plug ins go, if you dont wanna mic a cab, or use something like an eleven rack, just search on youtube "free plugins for metal guitar" or "free metal guitar plugins" or whatever, and just watch. Youtube is your friend when wanting to learn about how to use reaper and finding plugins. I know for a fact there are full playlists out there to learn how to use reaper properly, from start to finish. So consider looking for those.

For other basic plug ins like EQ, Compression, Noise Gate, etc, I wouldn't worry about those. Reaper comes with like 13 or so of it's own plugins. They honestly are some great plug ins as well, and are all you really need.

Here's a picture of my set up, with all the stuff I suggested in this post.


Hope that helps.