I've worked with Live before with my old band, and we got some really decent sounding home recordings from it.

Anyways tho, none of that stuff was mine, and now that that project is defunct, I am looking to record some demos for my new project so I can give them to potential band members as well as sending them out to labels. The project is a huge amalgamation of many of my favorite artists, Mgmt meets Fall out Boy meets the Killers, etc.

Anyways, I want to use Garageband I think because my friend was using it once and I was impressed with how easily he was able to splice together everything and the quality was decent considering that as well.

Now, my question. What hardware will I need and what can you recommend? I'm going to get garageband, how do the inputs work for my laptop, ie where can I hook in my guitar or synthe. What sort of converter will I need, as I very well can't easily put a patch cable in my laptop anywhere.

Also, I want decent synthe sounds, do I just get a midi keyboard and garageband offers a whole bunch of sounds and patches to meet that? I want decent sounding synthe sounds, killers type stuff, so I didn't know.

Any recommendations for what I'm trying to do?