The heart of home recording is an inexpensive mixing and editing setup. There is an increasing number of mixers for sale that are based on cassettes. I recommend the TEAC Tascam Porta One (for $450 street price; $549 list).
You can record 4-tracks at once onto one normal cassette tape. Or by systematically sweeping and mixing tracks, you get a poor
man’s 10-track mix with only two generations of recording on any one track. Perfect for adding orchestration to a one-person band. All micro-multitrack equipment is more awkward to operate than the large pro machines, but, hey, you can do it all with cassettes.
