I'm using a 1995 tower PC I replaced with a 98 model I got from my brother, a 1998 Peavey Unity 12 mixer I picked up for about $80, and a Shure KSM27 microphone I picked up off Craigslist. The mike is on a camera stand with a shock mount I made myself out of rubber. You can hear my Hammond H100 organ on Yellow Bird on inbojat.tumblr.com PIano tracks to follow, the Sohmer piano is out of tune again and that is on my list of things to do now that the winter rains have started.
The other channel mike is a $2 dynamic I picked up at Electrotex in 1976, the best of 5 cheap dynamic mikes I've picked up over the years, some at Goodwill. I'm looking for another Shure KSM27 or a SM32 but the former is always $300 only in Nashville, and the latter is always $400 new, no used ones available. The KSM27 is a vocal mike with a 7000-10000 hz 5 db rise for vocals; I intend to flatten the response a little with a pop filter sewn out of air conditioner filter foam. The bedroom my Sohmer piano in is very bright with hard wood furniture stacked around the room and no carpet. The Hammond was recorded in the living room with a lot of overstuffed furniture, record shelves on the walls, and carpet. The mike was 6 feet away from the organ.
I'd been looking for a quality pair of mikes for 45 years, ever since I picked up the tape recorder used. The KSM27 was a jewel in the rough: the previous owner was having trouble paying his rent after a move from down south, he said. Other mikes that are mentioned on record labels, like Neuman's, go for about $1000 for a housing missing the power supply board and capsule. The shure mikes are used as an area mike by a lot of string bands in this area, as seen on the TV programs Woodsongs and KET Jubilee. Looking at the picture on the screen is how I got the idea to buy the KSM27. Soundboard miking instead of area miking is more important if you have a lot of musicians in one studio playing at once. I play alone at home, and room ambient adds something to the sound IMHO without using digital reverb.
BTW the mainboard in this PC is a gigabyte 770 mhz pentium, ie nothing special. I have no sound card. The op system is Ubuntu Studio Linux 13, which is available for free download. The recording software is audacity, part of the UBST package.
The average track on Youtube was pretty vile, probably recorded with a cell phone. I refuse to do that. The recordings made of my high school band in 1968 by Austin Cusom Records were very disappointing, sounding nothing like reality. I determined then I wasn't going to record tracks with *****y microphones. Most of the use of the tape recorder was ripping off records and FM radio, although I did some work with my Ensoniq EPS sampler keyboard 1985-88 before it broke. that was recorded electrically keyboard to recorder with no microphones used. The microphone is the weak link, and you can't beat several hundred dollar bills to finance a QA programs that guarentees a response curve like the SM32 has.
To read more about microphones, see recordinghacks.com. However, many of the reviews there are from guitar/bass/drums bands, which can be done adequately IMHO with a $60 SM58 and some SM57's for the drum mikes. Piano is MUCH harder to mike correctly.
Have fun.
Topic: Cheap (but not too cheap) recording devices