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A band playing together in a room, captured on one microphone, beats the same band tracked separately to a click on better equipment. That is not nostalgia — it is because the thing you are trying to record is four people listening to each other, and that is destroyed by isolation.
The $0 way: one microphone, and you move the people
Put a single recording device — a phone is fine — in the middle of the room at head height, and play the song. Then listen back and move the players, not the microphone. The drummer is too loud: move the drummer back, or move everyone else forward. The vocal is buried: the singer steps toward the microphone. The bass is thin: turn the amp toward the mic rather than up.
This is a mixing desk made of floor space, and it is more powerful than it sounds. Ten minutes of moving people gets you a balance that would take an hour of faders — and unlike faders, it also fixes the bleed, because the balance is baked in correctly rather than fought afterwards.
The room matters more than the gear
Avoid the middle of a square room and avoid corners. A room with soft things in it — a sofa, curtains, a bed, people — will sound better than an empty one with hard parallel walls. A carpeted living room beats an empty garage every time, and a stairwell is a reverb chamber if you want one.
Kill the obvious noises first: fridge, air conditioning, a buzzing light, phones out of the room. On a live take there is no way to fix these later, because they are underneath everything.
The cheap pick
The M-Audio M-Track Solo ($49.00) gives you one microphone and one direct input at the same time. That combination is the first real step up from a single phone: a mic in the room for the drums and amps, and the bass or an acoustic plugged in clean. Two tracks, and you can balance those two afterwards.
The buy-once pick
The Behringer UMC404HD ($139.00) has four inputs, which is the number that covers most bands: overhead microphone, vocal, bass direct, guitar direct. You are still recording everyone at once, in the room, in one take — you just have four faders afterwards instead of one. This is the interface that stops being outgrown.
What nobody needs
A seven-piece drum microphone kit. One microphone above the kit and the room doing the rest is how a great many records you love were made, and it is much harder to get wrong. Eight-input interfaces for a four-piece. Isolation screens between players, which remove the exact thing you came for. And a click track, unless the arrangement genuinely needs one — a band locking to each other is the sound you are recording.
One microphone in the middle, and move the people until it balances. Add inputs only when you know which one you wished you had.
Three pages on this site that carry it further: The resources list · The best handheld recorder for songwriters · How to record music with no money.
Want the Whole Blueprint?
Gear is one piece. The step-by-step system for building a music career with no budget lives in the workbook.