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Creating Music at a Home Recording Studio
You can make high quality music at home because of the wonderful leaps in "prosumer" audio gear. A recording studio that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to build 25 years ago can be built for less than three thousand dollars now.
The most essential element of a good home studio in the 2000s is a high quality computer with lots of hard drive space and lots of RAM. Luckily high quality computers are becoming less costly. I recently bought a PC with 6GB of RAM for about $750.
After you buy your quality PC or Mac you need some kind of DAW software (this is an acronym for "Digital Audio Workstation") that you will be doing all of your mixing and recording with. By the way, if you're a Mac person, I recommend Logic Studio.
What's next on the priority list depends on what kind of music you want to make. For example if you want to make completely electronic music without any sort of live instrumentation or vocals then there's a good chance you will want to consider buying programs like Propellerheads Reason 4 but most people (even those doing electronic music) will need an audio interface so that they can record instruments and vocals.
I should note that many audio interfaces come with a basic DAW program so you can kill two birds with one stone when you buy your audio interface.
So what is an audio interface? To put it in the simplest possible terms, it's the "in between" between your audio inputs and your computer. I use the E-MU 1616 and I highly recommend it for those on a PC who do not need a whole lot of inputs. There's a wide selection of audio interfaces to choose from, it is really too large of a topic to cover in detail in this space. Again the "industry standard" is Pro Tools but that's not necessarily the best way to go.
Microphones tend to be one of the first investments that most home recording enthusiasts make and for very good reason.. A good mic lets you to record vocals and all sorts of acoustic instruments. It will clearly be a very important part of your home studio. If you can afford it, I would recommend checking out the KSM44 Condenser Mic. I've been using this mic for years and I very highly recommend it.
Another piece of recording gear that is definitely recommend is the Art MPA Gold Mic Preamp because it is a really great deal at the price it sells for.
ART Pro MPA II Studio 2-Channel Tube Preamp