Consider a 4-track cassette
I am sure someone else can give you ideas on the digital route...but as a person who is slowly moving into digital recording, and finding it quite unpleasant at this point, I want to promote the old 4-track cassette.
I assume from your post that you have just started thinking about recording. If you are concerned about the complexity of learning to use equipment and you are not overly concerned at this time with having cutting edge clearity I recommend recording to cassette tape.
I bought
a Yamaha MT-50 about 8 years ago for over $400. I still use it. It has double tape speed (something like 3 inches per second vs 1.5 inches per second on a regular cassette recorder) for greater clearity, a decent noise reduction feature, useful hi/low EQ knobs and knobs and a hook-up where you can plug in an effects box to add some reverb, etc...I'm sure they don't make them now but I would say a similar featured new 4-track today would be around $250 (probably a $150 or so on ebay). Add a basic effects unit (I use
an ART FX-1 that I bought from ebay for about $70) and a $60 Shure 58-QTR Dynamic Microphone...Hook the 4-track into the line-ins of a decent stereo (for monitoring and "feel"...you could just use headphone if you had to) and you would be ready to go...My users manual is only 32 pages long with large, spread-out print, and quite a few graphics...if you have used a regular cassette recorder before you already are half-way to knowing how to use a 4-Track and a little trial and error often teaches you the rest (but take an hour or two with the manual to get the info on setting-levels etc.) ...you do have to mix down to a regular speed cassette player or you can plug into a computer (I started doing this a year ago using Cakewalk Pyro, which is suprisingly easy and cost less than $40) so that you can listen to your songs in a conventional format. I find the sound very satifying (especially after I learnd to set the EQ by ear instead of by sight...I used to put too much bass on everything)...The main reason I am moving to digital is to get more tracks. you might find too that there may be times you would like to experiment and put something on the extra 3 tracks (or use two tracks and two microphones for stereo...though I don't don't know how effective or neccesary that would be with a single instrument...but stereo is always nice ...I'm sure it would add something if you miced the guitar at different areas)
Here is another thought...If you can get through your solo guitar songs in one take you could just get a good cassette tape recorder (regular speed, stereo, like a $100 TEAC). You could hook up a couple of $50 microphones (for stereo if you wish) to an inexpensive mixer (under a $100), then hook the mixer into the TEAC and record your final take straight to tape (which would contribute to a clean sound)...again, you could then go from the TEAC to computer...
I just thought of this...you could do the above but instead of using a TEAC cassette recorder you could go from microphone(s) to mixer to computer (using a program like Pyro 2004, which is designed to take analoge media like cassettes and old records to digital)...
The Advantaqe of the above is that a technophobe like me can at least understand what is going on in a analog-leaning enviroment. I now hope someone else will go more into the digital options for you...if you look through music catalogues and ask around you might find a stand-alone digital recorder that just records in mono (one track, or more accurately on channel) or stereo (I guess that would technically be two tracks or channels at once)...this would (probably) require you to do the whole song in one take (although I might be wrong about that...you can do some suprising edits with digital)
