No prob man, happy to help, not that I did
I usually tell people to spend some time reading and figuring out exactly what they want to do, recording wise. Just guitar? or do you want to be able to expand later into recording acoustic drums? Will you have any midi based equipment or do you foresee taking that plunge in the future? If you are deciding on a mixer, pick a decent one with good preamps so you don't neccesarily have to spend money on a board AND preamps. Also pick a board that you can grow into if your budget will allow it. If you take the mixer route, you'll also need to decide how you capture your "mixdowns" be-it DAT or CDR or Cassette or whatever. Compressors and reverbs and the like, it goes on and on lol but if you have the money at the time, whatever you are getting, make sure it has some long term value and get stuff that will give you a little room to grow.
Just to give you an idea, my finished setup is going to be a Yamaha 16/4 board, two M-Audio Delta 410 PCI soundcards, Sonar Cakewalk Home Studio 4.0XL. That's pretty much my input chain, minus the mics which vary. Mixing wise, from the cards back out to the board, I'm looking to get atleast 6 channels of compression through rack gear just because I already have some and I still want an RNC. I use
an Alesis Microverb 4 on one of the effects loops just to add a little bit of character the some tracks and adjust each track individually as needed, not always on all though. I've also got some hum elimination and denoising stuff that I can plug in there somewhere should I need it. Mains outs on the board going to
a Samson Servo 120 amp, and I haven't decided on my Passive Monitors yet. Mixing to a Pioneer Component CDR bruner using REC OUT to the analog ins on the burner, still looking for a A/D converter to put inbetween there so I can use the digital ins on the burner. Other than that, the only other thing I can foresee needing is maybe a headphone amp, but I typically do the solo thing so we'll see if I have company anytime soon lol