Gear: (Hardware)
Compaq Presario (200 Mhz Pentium, Windows 98, 48MB RAM)
Soundblaster Gold sound card
Mackie CFX20 mixing board
2 Shure SM57 Mics
6 off-brand dynamic mics
1 Octava condenser mic

Primary Musical Equipment:
Fender Stratocaster (guitar)
Kaman Acoustic (guitar)
Ludwig drums
Series 10 Bass guitar
Fender 65 guitar amplifier

Gear: (Software)
n-track Studio
Cool Edit.

[..] "Our general setup is as follows. We'd plug the mics into the mixing board and mic the instrument(s) being recorded. Then we'd take the "tape out" jacks from the mixer into the "line in" jack of the Soundblaster Gold sound card. We used the Soundblaster card for recording only, and I have a second sound card (crappy) in my machine that we used for playback and monitoring during overdubs. Thus, we were capable of recording 2 mono tracks (or 1 stereo) at a time (the output from the mixer is stereo). We used the Reverb effects built into the Mackie mixer, because our computer did not have enough power to really use the N-track effects. The down side is that the reverb is burned into the vocal track. We mic'd the drum kit with 7 mics and used the Mackie mixer to mix those 7 channels into a single stereo track for n-track. For bass, we mixed together 2 signals for the sound. We mic'd the

To record a song, here's what we did.
1. First, record the drums and a rhythm guitar onto a single stereo track.
2. Overdub a scratch vocal
3. Overdub bass
4. Overdub additional guitars
5. Re-record lead vocal
6. Overdub backing vocals
7. Overdub additional "bells and whistles"
8. Apply compression to tracks as appropriate (with Cool Edit)
9. Mixdown the song.

Afterwards, we would also use Cool Edit to trim the song, fade out, etc.

Tips and tricks we learned while using n-track:
1. Keep you hard disc less than half full, and defragment often. The best disk defragmentation software out there is OnTrack FixIt!. Using that software, I was able to keep my drive optimized enough that we had 12 tracks on most songs (and this is using my 200Mhz Pentium w/48MB RAM).

2. If you're overdubbing a 20-second guitar solo that doesn't start until 2 minutes into the song, move the cursor 2 minutes into the song and START recording there (instead of recording an entire 2+minute track). That keeps the size of your tracks down and maximizes the total number of tracks you'll be able to reach. Most of our overdubs consist of small wav files.

3. Use the "record on the same track" button when overdubbing. Let's say you have a 4 minute song with 3 choruses. If you need to overdub a backing vocal that only occurs on the choruses, rather than record an entire 4+ minute track (40MB file size), record 3 smaller files ON THE SAME "CHANNEL". This
results in 3 separate wav files (maybe 10MB total size).

4. Always rename your track's wav files to something meaningful immediately after recording. That way, when you need to clean up disc space, you'll know that files named "n-track001.wav etc." can be deleted".