Coming here with over +40 years in the recording business here's my important tip. KISS! That means, concentrated your purchases on inexpensive Shure SM57/58's. Pick up a bag of them and a couple of Rode 55's and a couple of LDC's. Get yourself a nice little computer multitrack interface like the 8 microphone input FireWire-based Presonus interfaces with their bundled Steinberg Cuebase LE and you're good to go. Remember less is more! Don't use any EQ unless you absolutely have to. Don't compress the crap out of everything but most things like vocals, some drums, limit keyboards. Know that your favorite platinum selling group has most of their instruments recorded upon inexpensive dynamic microphones. Good quality capacitor/condenser microphones are not an absolute necessity but are generally a frequently needed luxury. When you need to have THAT sound that's when you need those, otherwise you don't.

Even your basic limited edition software will have all of the features that you need to produce a professional product with. Expensive plug-ins are basically designed to emulate old-school analog equipment. So if you need that 1176 limiter sound or that LA 2 limiter sound, you want an emulation of that. But that's only if you think or know you need that particular device on some particular source. What you don't know can help you. You first learn how to use & manipulate your basic software before you start grabbing after esoteric analog modeled plug-ins. It's interesting to note that most basic versions of ProTools include software emulations of those 2 particular brands/types of limiters. One being optical with its specific ballistics and the other being FET variable voltage resistor type limiter of the 1176 by Bomb Factory. So perhaps an entry-level Avid/Digidesign M-Box (choose your version) with its bundled ProTools that already has the emulated 1176 & LA 2 limiters, included with the basic software package, you don't need any dang other plug-ins. So you might want to go that route? There can be specific frustrating issues for someone just starting out utilizing ProTools? It's not necessarily as user intuitive as some of the other software's out there. In many ways, it's the closest thing we have to any kind of industry standard software. And their new version 9 is supposedly, supposed to be compatible with other manufacturers hardware which wasn't the case in the past. However, I don't think any of their current systems that include their bundled ProTools is supplying ProTools 9. I believe they're still supplying ProTools 8 in their bundled equipment with software packages? But really what most of us want is ProTools 9 since we can now use just about any hardware with it. But I still haven't invested in the upgrade to it. They're going to have to handle things differently now because of this. Their software used to be $300 US but this new version is $600 US since you're not buying any of their crappy hardware. I believe the upgrades are still 250 or $300 US? Plus, depending upon what & how you want to record, ProTools 8 & 9 have much better MIDI implementation than any of their earlier releases like ProTools 7 that I'm using. But since I don't do any MIDI, it's not a big sales point for me to upgrade to 9. Just some things to think about. And then there's headphones & speakers. I personally have been working upon JBL for most of my 40 years and now also including KRK in the past 10 years, as I feel they translate well to my JBL's. And so do my Sennheiser 280 headphones translate well to the JBL & KRK's. This kind of similar consistency is important to me. But it's all subjective and you have to find what works well for you. And welcome to the best little sound house on the Internet, Recording.org! Keep coming back so we can abuse you more.

The most abusive moderator
Mx. Remy Ann David

Remy,
Thank you for such great advice. This is a terrific starting point for me.
I'll put this post in my files for reference.

PS. Good Luck Shark