Home recording has been a hobby of mine for some time, although I don't have much time to put into it and even less money than I have time.

As far as my background is concerned, I was a singer, songwriter and bassist for nearly 20 years in local bands and played acoustic guitar on my own for longer than that. I picked up whatever lead guitar skills I have over the years and am just now beginning to work on a bit of keyboard and drums.

My home studio consists of a very basic 4-track cassette Tascam porta02MKII as the main recording unit (not quite state-of-the-art, I know). Supporting this are two Phonic (www.phonic.com) brand units. A DFX256 multi-effects unit does an adequate job of providing a true stereo reverb, delay, flanger type effects and an MM1002 mixing console provides my high-quality microphone inputs with 2 channel equalization. Both of these are quite low priced but get the job done in reasonable fashion.

Rounding off the recording equipment there are 3 RadioShack (I know, I know.....on sale) by Shure microphones and an Older Shure microphone (easily the poorest of the lot). Also there's an older Sharp cassette tape deck used for mixdown, an old Pioneer receiver coupled to 2 RCA floor speakers for monitoring. A $7.00 used keyboard for my "canned drums", a RadioShack special effects generator and a huge array of cables and adapters.