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Just as important is your choice of speakers. PC speakers are often fairly basic, and better ones are designed to flatter music rather than give an accurate reproduction of your recordings. Accuracy is paramount in speakers designed for music production. This means high clarity and low distortion so you can hear the details in your mixes, plus a flat frequency response so you're not compensating for your speakers' deficiencies when you come to mix.

Studio speakers, known as monitors, come in active designs - which include built-in amplification - and passive designs, which don't.You should therefore choose the former unless you have a high-quality amplifier going spare. The best sets cost tens of thousands of pounds, but prices start at around £100, and these sets will be more useful for music production than the average £100 PC speakers, even if they don't sound quite as impressive. Spending £200 should get you something you won't grow out of in a hurry.

This may well turn out to be the most expensive part of your studio, but it's the area where larger investments give the greatest reward. If your budget simply won't stretch that far, you could always postpone buying monitors until a later date. One useful feature of PC music production is that it's very easy to go back and rework things, which you might want to do once you've upgraded your monitors.

If you plan to record acoustic instruments and overdub one instrument on top of another, you'll also need a pair of headphones. Otherwise, the

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sound from your speakers will leak into the microphone while recording, making it harder to edit and mix. Headphones can also be useful for working at anti-social times, but it's tricky to produce accurate mixes using headphones, so they're not a substitute for decent monitors.

You probably have some headphones already, but the cable might be too short to position the performer a reasonable distance away from noisy PC fans. If you need to buy a set, you'll find a wide range in specialist music stores, with prices starting at around £20. Go for a closed-back design, which reduces sound leakage compared to open-backed designs.

Taking the mic

Microphones cost anything from £1 to £3,000 although, as with most technology, you start to see diminishing returns above a certain point. £30 microphones are serviceable, £100 models are generally excellent and £1,000 ones are even better, but not 10 times better.

You should avoid cheap microphones without an XLR output, as they won't benefit from a balanced output. We also recommend avoiding USB microphones. These have a built-in preamp and USB audio interface, which reduces costs but makes them tricky to integrate with larger recording setups. They're great for podcasting, but less useful for music production.

Microphones fall into two groups: dynamic and condenser. Dynamic mics are robust, making them ideal for stage use and recording very loud instruments such as drums. Shure's SM57 (£66) and SM58 (£68) are classic examples; the former is a popular choice for instruments, the latter for vocals. Other models from Shure and Sennheiser start at around £25.

However, for vocals, a condenser microphone is usually better, and it's the obvious choice for acoustic guitars, drum overheads (microphones positioned over the whole drum kit), pianos and other acoustic instruments. These mics give a richer, more detailed tone, particularly for quiet sounds. They require phantom power, which not all preamps offer. We recommend Rode's NT1A (£119), although Samson's C01 (£36) is a reasonable low-cost alternative.