Well, Brendan, you have been bitten by the bug. I could go on for 100 pages or so answering the question that you have asked, and I am really a beginner. I will, however, try to give you general useful advice in one page instead. First, realize that with $2000, you can't do everything well, so try to do something well. Try to buy inexpensive equipment that you find on the gear list of many professional studios, because when you upgrade, you will add gear rather than selling it.
Next, listen to Rick. Take a real good account of the space you have to record in. A recording studio is not a soundproofed room, it's a room that sounds good. More advanced studios may hava vocal booth or anechoid chamber (no echo), a "dead" room, that is pretty well soundproofed, a "live" room, one that just sounds good, and a "control" room, where there are monitors and buku controls. For us po' folk, this may all be one room, with an area partitioned off, or an adjacent closet as a vocal booth. Rick was pointing out that a significant percentage of your budget should be spent on the modification of your space to maximize its acoustic potential. Either make it sound good, or at least make it sound dead.
Third- spook around here for quite a while before you spend any of that precious money. Won't you be pissed, when you find out you've got RFI (radio frequency interference) in your power lines, you need a voltage regulator, but you spent all your money, and all you can record is KRAM? There are a lot of peripherals involved here, cables, headphones, mic stands, monitors. Figure out all the stuff you need to start, and make sure you have planned for it.
Next, take stock of everything you own already, computers, amps, instruments, pedals, whatever. Instruments are critical here. Nothing sounds quite as awful as a $500 mictophone in front of a bad $100 guitar.
A corollary of the above is that if the music sucks, and the instrument sucks, and the player sucks, and the room sucks, the recording *will* suck. After-production, mixing, and mastering are much easier if you start with an honest clean recording of something worth recording.
What you need in terms of gear depends on what you want to record. A live band needs many channels, many mics, and a considerable mixer. One gypsy violinist needs one or two wicked mics and a killer preamp. You cannot build your studio to do everything, so build it around the room you have, and the music you play. As far as your question about gear, you'll have to describe what you want to record. String quartet? Hip Hop? Jazz trio? Grand piano? Every recording situation requires a different approach.
I believe the heart and soul of a studio, beyond the room itself, is not what is used to record the music. It is the mics and preamps that capture the sound, and the speakers it is played back through. Probably the nastiest up-front expense are monitors. You can get pretty good cheap mics, preamps, FX boxes, compressors, digital recorders, sound cards, but there are *no* really cheap monitors that are worth a damn. The bottom feeder stuff begins at about $300 the pair.-Richie
Hahahahahah,.......oh boy, if you only knew.
So fear not, this is ONE person who hasn't even built his "studio" yet. I was in the EXACT same boat as you not too many years ago, and I STILL havn't got my studio built. So don't worry about that stuff here. This is HOME RECORDING.com, not PROSOUNDWEB, ok? Sorry if I gave that impression. Man, what a moron I can be sometimes.
......I was told on good authority that they were great for resistance absorption.... especially cobwebs