Heya
I run Acid Music Studio on my laptop, it's very, very good... very entry-level and you can produce incredibly professional results with a little practice. I got my copy of Acid from the Sony website for about forty GBP, which is astonishingly cheap for the quality of the software. Unfortunately, most computers only record mono in, at least I've found, but for jam sessions all you need is Acid to record the whole thing into, and a little four-track mixer you can pick up for about fifteen GBP. I've found I can get a really good, clean mix, even if it is mono, but once we've got a song structure worked out from the quicky jams, we record every element seperately into Acid so we can get a good stereo mix.
A trick I use... I've found a way to cheat the mono when we do the final recordings - if you record the electric guitar parts twice, then put them in seperate channels in Acid, pan seperately and EQ them a little, you have a really clean stereo sound). I personally record all my bass guitar parts for final mixes straight off the bass, and EQ them in Acid, as I've found going off the amp dulls the sound once it's recorded.
With drums, same as the guitar... we have a knackered mono mincrophone which is painfully directional, but once we get the position of it pretty good, we record the drum track twice and pan the two mono tracks seperately.
Don't know if this helps, but if you've got a grand to burn then DON'T be suckered in by things like MPCs and 48 track digital mixers with so many bells and whistles you'll never figure how to use them all. Keep it so childishly simple that a monkey could do it. Then, if anything breaks, gets beer spilled on it or shorts out, you aren't left with a grand's worth of kit sitting in your garage gathering dust.
Hope this helps
