Thanks for the great replies so far! I do not have a band, but my close friend records music and him and I would probably have to record a couple parts at a time, so a portastudio seems best. I think he has a very nice compressor, a lot of good microphones, but i don't think he has a reverb effect. Can you guys send me links to some gear i should be looking for? Like the mixers, effects, and cassette deck? I don't really know what to look for and I would really appreciate you guys getting me in the right direction. I live in Charlotte, NC by the way.
OK. So you're going to need a Portastudio, a reverb and a stereo cassette deck to mixdown to.
Let's start with the Portastudio. These come in 4 track and 8 track varieties and have the mixer built in So you won't need a separate mixer with a Portastudio. The 8 track ones will be rarer to find and cost you more money. I asked you earlier what your budget was for this project and you didn't answer that. So it's tough to make meaningful suggestions without knowing that. Also, about sending you links, no one is going to shop the Internet for you. We've already mentioned Craig's List and Ebay as being the most popular. Getting back to the Portastudios for a minute. The 4 track ones will allow you to record up to 3 parts before you have to mix that down to the 4th track where you can then add on 3 more parts. So if you have a very simple song of drums, bass, guitar and one vocal, a 4 track would work well for that. But if you're going to add keyboard, separate lead guitar parts and backing vocals, you're going to need to bounce tracks to fit all those parts in. And the more bounces you do, the worse the sound quality gets and the less chances you have to fix mistakes. So an 8 track model will be a lot easier and more flexible to work with but they will cost more on average. Decent 4 track models from TASCAM for the Portastudios would be the 244, 246 and 424 in the 4 track category. Models like the 488 and 688 are the 8 track models.
Reverbs. Companies like Alesis made some fairly inexpensive ones like the micro-verb and midi-verb series. These will offer a variety of simulated environments like halls, stadiums, smaller rooms, etc. Most of those can be found used for around $100. Companies like Roland and Yamaha also made these units and are a bit quieter, hiss wise and a bit more expensive. So if you have a larger budget to work with, look for those too. Models like the Yamaha REV-500 are true stereo units and are very clean and natural sounding.
Cassette decks. Names like TEAC, Nakamichi, Harmon Kardon, Denon, Aiwa and Sony all made some great sounding cassette decks and the 3 head models will offer up better specs then the 2 head models. Look for newer models with feather touch transport buttons and Dolby C or dbx noise reduction built in to keep the noise levels down. Older decks with mechanical "piano key" style transport buttons and only Dolby B will be cheaper usually but be more problematic.
Double cassette decks. Again, look for the same names and transport features but know that none of those will be of the 3 head variety. So the specs won't be as good as the 3 head single well decks. Prices can range wildly for this kind of stuff so be cautious of extremely low prices or sellers who claim they know nothing about the deck or say they have no way to test it or say that it worked fine the last time they used it 25 years ago. People are creative liars. Learn to be weary of them. Also, don't buy anything from a Craig's list ad where you can't go to the sellers house and get them to demonstrate that everything works before you hand over your money. People who want to meet you in a coffee shop or somewhere else where you can't test it are to be avoided. And that applies to any of the gear we're talking about here. Also, you have parents right? Get one of them who knows a bit about cassette decks to help you out. Maybe they know quite a bit about this stuff but you never talked to them about it. Old people know a lot of weird shit. Make use of their knowledge! And that goes equal with teachers, older cousins, aunts, uncles...even grandparents. You like Analog because its retro and cool, right? Well so is the act of talking to other humans face to face.
Cheers!