Marty,
Like you I'm just beginning. There is a lot of information available so it's easy to get information overload and frustrated. Nothing kills having fun like frustration. Here are links to different items that have helped me get started.
Introduction to Music Production Starts TOMORROW (July 14) and lasts for six weeks. FREE! Most likely the best introduction and overview to music production that you will find anywhere at any price. All the course materials can be downloaded for offline study and use as reference material in the future. Download all of it, you'll be glad you did as there is a lot of material presented during the six weeks. I can not say enough good things about this FREE course (that starts TOMORROW!).
Play With Your Music In progress but don't worry about having to catch up, it's self paced. Music Production presents a lot of information in a short timeframe, this course presents a few core ideas at a leisurely pace. The two courses complement each other and would work well if they were combined into one course.
Music and Computers An online textbook that details how computers handle music as data. Really good and practical descriptions of how audio works inside the computer. Helps clear up the fog concerning things like sample rate, bit width, digital to analog or analog to digital conversion, bandpass filters, equalization, comb filtering and other stuff that you kind of know what's being talked about.
The Art of Mixing A 2 1/2 video companion to the David Gibson book, "The Art Of Mixing". The video visually demonstrates mixing concepts like frequency spread, panning, use of effects and sound levels. This video doesn't tell you what, or what not, to do but does help you to better understand what's good and bad and why bad sounds bad. It will help prevent you from going in circles.
IF you plan to track (record) vocals and instruments but don't do this very often it's nice to have a reference book to turn to for good how-to advice.
The Musician's Guide To Home Recording was published in 1993 so much of the information does not apply to the digital age but the tracking on a budget information is just as useful now as it was then. There are also great photographs showing the recording set up for many instruments.
A few years later, another book came out with "recipes" to sweeten mixes.
Using Your Portable Studio discusses mixing on analog equipment but the recipes work just as good in the digital age. In an earlier posting rharv mentions there are general rules of thumb that you can follow. "Using Your Portable Studio" is filled with these general rules of thumb.
A resource that covers the use of effects and what each knob does is
Guerilla Home Recording.
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