At lot of this Toucher is based on what you plan to do with this stuff. If you want to treat this like you're in a real studio like Scott and others do then you record and work with each track individually using many different synths or hardware for it. you might spend several hours on one track. Each step along the way could involve a different synth, custom patches, different plugin's for effects etc. You can spend half a day just auditioning patches from say 4 or 5 different soft synths then plug a few of your keyboards or sound modules and try those sounds too. Then spend another half day just messing around with effects both plugins and hardware. Just for one track. Then when you've finished the basic redording of all your tracks you may spend many hours or days massaging everything to finally arrive at a final mix using a completely different set of plugins or outboard hardware just for mixing. That's what they do in a real studio and if you want to get close to that level of sound quality then that's what you have to do as well. This is what I meant by saying 'could be confusing'.

A lot of others on this forum like to keep it simple. They may use one basic GM synth like the VSC or Forte DXi and that's it. Do the song in Biab using one synth, maybe move it over to RB to add a couple of things and burn it to a CD or wav file and done. You could do one song in an hour.

What you intend to do will determine if you need a $500 interface like my 1820M or will a basic Rockfish PCi card for $30 work, and synths, plugins, mixers and all that stuff. On the one hand it's pretty basic and simple but on the other it can get incredibly complex.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.