tricky thing. You need adequate acoustic treatment for your room to get the best results. Agreed on that. The sennheiser e845 also get's recommended a lot. This is a super cardoid microphone so it's a much tighter pickup pattern than something like the SM58 which might help if there's background noise but might take more time to get to use well. Be wary of buying microphones there are a lot of fakes out there (especially on ebay) and they're not always easy to spot. It's worth trying Presonus Studio One if you want to go down the 'legal' route of acquiring a DAW. They do Studio One Free, which has all the features you'd need for producing and recording for an unlimited time. Features like external plugins aren't allowed in the free version, but it comes with everything you'd need to start up. If you are just making music using MIDI and not recording audio, that's essentially all you need. It isn't ideal as in a perfect world you'd have midi controllers, interfaces and studio monitors but enough decent producers use a laptop and computer speakers when starting out. For recording vocals, you can get fairly decent USB microphones nowadays if you can't afford everything you'd need for a full microphone setup. You'd need an audio interface which allows the microphones signal to be transferred into your DAW, and possibly a preamp just to help the signal. As for actual microphones, i'm not too sure why SM57's and 58's have