If you have a Mac it comes with a really nice DAW. The "real" recording guys will laugh, but GarageBand is pretty nice. You still need a decent audio interface, but you can buy a decent single channel one for like $40. I use StudioOne for my serious recording (which at this point is almost entirely just band practice live recordings) and GarageBand when I'm writing music. Excepting plugins, the quality of the sound you get out of GarageBand is the same as what you get out of StudioOne, it's mostly due to the interface. Most of the plugins transfer back and forth anyway.
The nice things about GarageBand:
- It's extremely simple to use, I find the layout really intuitive, you can record very easily and add in the more advanced features (like mastering) if you want/later as you learn
- The drums, oh my the drums. I've tried doing drums using loops in other DAWs, it's so time consuming and complicated. I find it really easy to get crappy drums out of StudioOne. On the other hand GarageBand has built in drummers, it's as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Again easy to start, and easy to make them how you want them later on. You can adjust the kit the drummer is playing and how complex it is, on and on, it's really endless in capability, while still being really easy to do.
The bad things about GarageBand:
- limited bass plugins
- the bass plugins that are there seriously color your recordings. To get around this you can record the bass just as audio rather than applying plugins
For recording samples you can record along with a drum track then remove the drum track if you want to highlight just how the bass sounds on it's own. I don't like doing that, so I normally just write a simple song and use different voicings in it.
