P.S. - I'm mainly concerned with getting a full sounding vocal with power and a little gain.

I would not worry about effects and gadgets as much as a good level and signal chain. (mic, pre-amp, mixer audio interface)

Once you have recorded the tracks then experiment with the effects. The Sonitus Suite included in S3P is really pretty good.

What are you using to input your signal?

Mike

:?

This is typical of the first step from musician to Audio engineer, what do all these things do?, why should I use them?

This all takes time, and the first thing you should worry about it getting good clean recordings of everything you are recording.

This is why most people serious about recording at home invest in a decent soundcard, you pay for the quality of the A/D converters that allow you to record your vocals guitar etc into the PC.

Once you have the basics recorded you will more than likely need to process the recordings.

First tip would be to normalise your tracks, better to use something like Sound Forge or Wavelab, but you can normalise in Sonar, this will lift the level of recording and give it some more volume.

As far as all the gadgets that mess with the sound here are some basics, and as mentioned the sonitus effects are very good.

Compression: This will squeeze your tracks and reduce transient spikes in the recorded audio while lifting the main body of the track so you can hear the main content better, it also adds punch to to things like kick drums and bass. However this can be a difficult effect to get your head around, but in my opinion is essential. It is better to edit the audio first before applying compression to remove huge spikes in tracks like vocals, these spikes will stop a track from being normalised and if removed are in 99.99% of the time inaudible, I used cakewalks limiter for this also included with Sonar once spikes are removed you will find you can lift the volume of the recording to proper levels.

EQ: This can help you shape the frequency of a recorded part, e.g. boost the bass on a bass guitar, add a bit of treble to vocals etc, the inbuilt EQ is easiest to use if you activate the EQ and the plot window in sonar this allows you to see what you are doing rather than just working with numbers.

Reverb: This adds space to tracks and give them a live feel, don't over do it! Work out how to set this up as a bus effect and setup sends to it on all the tracks in the mixer view.

Delay: Is echo, setup as a bus effect and use sends.

If you can get your head around that lot for the time being you will be getting somewhere.

:D