Bill: Congratulations on your new acquisition. Hope it brings much happiness to your and your family and critters. My recommendation for your "studio" is to take a slow and steady approach. Start with a good tape recorder (with dubbing capability) and record directly to it from your keyboard. Next acquire a digital recorder (too many good ones to mention) but I use a Boss (Roland) BR-864. Record from the tape player/recorder into the Digital Recorder and transfer the resultant digital song to your PC (via USB)for editing and enhancement. I use a nice "free" editor called Wave Pad (from Australia) and am highly pleased with it.

Once I have a song edited the way I think it sounds best, I copy the file to my Dell DJ so I can listen to be sure the song is all that it should be before commiting it to a CD. This saves me tons of CDs not to mention all the time I save. Finally, I print the song info & titles directly on top of the CD with an Epson R200 Inkjet. (Requires Printable CD-Rs now beginning to show up on Wal-Mart shelves.) Fairly inexpensive, too!

Hope this helps. I can't afford to have my songs cut in a professional studio yet. For making demos (some say these are just a little more than fancy work tapes) I am satisfied that it gets the song across to the record label or publisher. (I want somebody talented to sing and record my songs because I am not a performer.)

All the best,

RICE (The Lone Arranger)