Home Setup on a Budget....help!

[TheWorst]

Hey everybody. Glad I found this site!! I am interested in setting up a very budget minded home studio to produce some urban music tracks. I would like to do this "old-school," meaning no PC or Mac. I have in the past had and messed around with (with little or no success) many different programs, such as Fruity, Reason, Cool Edit, Acid, and several others I cannot remember.
I won a Yamaha RX-17 on Ebay, and have a keyboard that has MIDI (I don't have it in front of me to tell the brand or model.) I assume that AT THE MINIMUM I also need a multi-track recorder, a mixer, a speak system, and a microphone setup. So what do you all recommend for this setup? Please remember that I don't have tons on money to spend. I am assuming that I can find stuff that is considered "behind the time" tech-wise, for not a lot o' $$.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks

 

[Imaduck]

Few questions:
What exactly is your budget?
How much (if any) expieriance do you have with recording?
How much quality are you hoping for?
What instraments are you planning on recording?

 

[TheWorst]

I probably will spend about $2K, but not all at once.
I have limited experience with some programs...Acid, Fruity, Reason.
Quality isn't a great concern right now, I just want to figure out how to do this stuff and then maybe upgrade.
Instruments would be a keyboard and a drum machine for starters, maybe bass and guitar later on.

 

[tedluk]

How "old school" do you want to go? I mean, are you thinking of using tape? Or are you looking at one of the digital recorders from Roland, Korg, Fostex, Yamaha, Zoom or others?

Is it just you? You're going to do all the tracking yourself? How dense do you think things will get? Analog is great, but doing lots of overdubs can be problematic on a narrow format tape.

Depending on how good you want things to sound and how much you want to spend, there is a huge number of digital recorders to choose from right now. On the lower end, my first choices would be some of the smaller Korgs or maybe the Yamaha. I don't know how the Zoom recorders sound. They always look simple to use, but I never hear anyone using them. Higher up, I'd look at the new Korgs. I just don't like Roland myself, but lots of people do.

On the higher end, I'd say to look hard at the Akai DPS24. An awesome recorder with a ton of features!

Ted