DubAC
Playing your own music, writing your own songs and wanting to record them yourself at home is a natural progression for any musician/songwriter. There are many ways in which you can do that and these days it is easier and more affordable than ever.
In the past, most the high cost of quality equipment had kept this stage of musicianship in the realm of the music company or the already established musician with a record contract and a fat royalty check coming in every month. Before the maturing of the digital recording age and the advances in technology that made top quality equipment not only affordable but readily available to amateur and fledgling pro musicians, to record your songs at home meant buying bulky, expensive analog equipment such as reel to reel tape machines capable of recording 4, 8 or 16 multi-tracks, then another reel-to-reel 2-track mastering machine with a huge mixing desk to put it all together along with outboard equipment which could end up costing you as much as the main recording equipment.
But with what can only be described as a revolution in digital recording equipment over the last few years, the price of equipment has dropped dramatically along with the amount of equipment you actually need to render a high quality recording of your songs. Gone are the bulky and cumbersome multi-track reel-to-reel tape machines. Gone are the huge mixing desks and gone is the outboard. A small, portable 12 or 16 or even 24 track recording device that is no larger than a laptop can literally do it all for you as a standalone machine or be hooked up to your laptop via USB to take advantage of powerful digital recording and mastering software such as Cuebase.
Today's home recording studio can live on a small desk alongside a laptop and a pair of good headphones. Its an amazingly compact, neat and versatile version of what used to take a up whole room!