Regarding microphone preamplifiers: A valid question is whether you need a stand-alone mic preamp or whether the built in one in your handheld recorder is acceptable. The answer is, it depends. I own a very high quality stand-alone mic preamp and digital to analog converter (now out of production), so I use it. But I have used the built in mic preamp in the Denon-Marantz recorder, and it sounds quite good although somewhat noisy if recording soft sounds. Some less expensive recorders have taken shortcuts, but it is not that difficult or costly to include decent mic preamps in portable recorders these days, and most recorders seem to have reasonably decent built-in preamps. I'd spend my money on good microphones and a good recorder before I worried about a better stand-alone mic preamp. The two Zoom recorders have good built-in mic preamps; you don't need external ones.
The pertinent performance spec on mic preamps is "equivalent input noise". "Perfect", limited by physics is about -129 dBu, Really good preamps can come close, -128 or so. Anything worse than -118 or so may be an issue recording quiet instruments. If you can't find the spec, take that as a warning, the unit is noisy and they don't want you to know.
You will need some software to properly edit your recording. The software, at the minimum, needs to be able to do the following:
- To trim the beginning and end points of the recording.
- To adjust the audio levels of the recording.
- To include (either built-in or as a plug-in) a limiter to inaudibly remove extraneous peaks recorded with the audio, so your recording will play at reasonable levels on most playback systems; better yet a loudness controller.
A good choice (particularly because it is free!) is software called "Audacity". You may want to get an additional limiter or loudness plugin, I'm not sure how well the built-in one sounds these days. One last item: It is important to have a good monitoring setup, with a flat frequency response when you are doing post-production, particularly if you are considering adding equalization. If your system is bass-heavy (like many home consumer monitors), your final product will probably be the opposite, bass-weak. You should also listen to any final product both on speakers and with headphones. More than half of all music listening these days is with headphones, and what you will hear in headphones is very different than what you hear from speakers.