1. You can do it! If you play an instrument or sing and have any amount of ability to use a computer, with a little bit of training you can be well on your way to creating recordings you can be proud to release.
2. Recording: It doesn't really matter what you use. What matters more is how you use it. The big lesson I learned is to aim to get things right at the recording stage, because as much as it's a pain to try to 'fix' a bad sounding acoustic guitar in the mix (I had to do that), it's an impossibly un-gratifying pain to try to deal with it in the mastering stage (I also had to do that .. but ultimately I re-recorded it so that it sounded good right off the bat).
3. Mixing: You don't have to compress everything. It's ok to let some things slide into the background and provide a nice wash for the main instruments to rest on. I did this with acoustic guitars in a few songs, and I think it turned out rather nicely.
4. Mastering: There is more to it than EQ, compression and limiting. For example, making sure you encode mp3s properly. I sent one song out that had an accidental easter egg of being 18 minutes long. You could fast forward all the way to minute 18, and parts of the song would still be playing. But if you let it play from start to finish, it was just the regular 3 minutes and change. :) However, for the audio sweetening part of mastering, I'll let you in on my method. In the end, what worked for me was a hybrid of modern auto mastering and traditional manual mastering. I used a program called AAMS and played around with the profiles until I found roughly the sound I was looking for. I processed each track through that and left enough room to do more work. Then I did all of the final compression, limiting and extra EQ tweaks manually using level matched reference tracks). And I mastered as best I could to DR8. The results are that each track is plenty loud and clean.
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