Not necessarily. Professional equipment is designed so it is as easy as possible to get good results - but at a price. Equipment suitable for home and project studios often has as many facilities, but the overall performance may be compromised. Yes, you will be more likely to get good recordings with the really expensive gear, but in your home studio you have time to experiment and, with care and a bit of ingenuity, impressive results are possible.

As far as keyboards go, you need at least one sampler and one synth. The sampler can access a tremendous range of sounds, the synth is capable of subtle variations in the tones it can produce. The two complement each other very well. It won’t hurt you to play an acoustic instrument either, or find someone who can!

You can probably get most of the equipment, but bear in mind that the staff of music shops often know a lot about the equipment but not so much about the real process of recording. There are a number of mail order professional studio suppliers who concentrate on recording equipment and the bits and bobs you need to make it all fit together properly.

At least eight. The sound quality of four track recorders can be amazingly good, but for modern musical styles having just four tracks can be very restricting, unless you use your four tracker in conjunction with a sizable MIDI system. Even with eight tracks, you have to plan your recordings carefully. With sixteen or more tracks, you have room to be more spontaneous and creative. When you have twenty-four audio tracks at your disposal, your project studio has, at least in this respect, reached a professional level.

You would, because as long as you have a tape/MIDI synchroniser you can use any combination of your MIDI equipment on any track of the tape. This vastly increases the range of sounds and effects you can obtain. Tape is also a safer storage medium. Whatever you put on tape today will be there tomorrow. With synth and MIDI data stored on a computer disk, it’s easy to make a mistake and lose something important.

You can probably work it out yourself, but a good rule of thumb to start with is at least one and a half times as many channels as tape tracks (or tape tracks plus MIDI instrument outputs). As you add to your effects rack you will undoubtedly find that your requirement for more channels grows, so it pays to think ahead.

DAT or reel-to-reel. The quality of ordinary cassettes, even chrome or metal, is just not good enough for music mastering. A reel-to-reel recorder should be half-track stereo (definitely not quarter track - examples still crop up on the secondhand market) and must run at a speed of 15 inches per second. It is an advantage if it takes large 10 1/2" NAB spools. The advantage of DAT is that it is pretty much a music industry standard and offers a very clear sound. Reel to reel can be edited with inexpensive tools and has a warm sound quality that many engineers like.