I started with a lil' ol' Tascam Porta 02MKII Portastudio 4-track cassette recorder, and inexpensive Nady Starpower 1, microphones. I felt the recordings were noisy and thin-sounding. I mistakenly blamed it on this equipment. I'm into digital now... learning the ropes with a Griffin Imic running into a Apple Imac ...but I've recently gone back to tape for fun found that I could have made a lot of improvement with just a couple of modifications in equipment and technique:

• Preamp ahead of the microphones. Follow the link for more.
• Choice of microphone. Some mics produce a meatier tone, especially with a good preamp behind them. The inexpensive Nady mics actually did a decent job - hear clips at the link.
• Double the guitar tracks and pan them off to separate sides. Makes for a bigger sound.
• When mixing down, disconnect the mic's. On my Tascam Porta02 the line-ins always seem to be live, even when with selectors on 'safe'. Disconnecting the line-ins reduced the noise.
• Also on mix down, be sure to use the Line Out's NOT the headphone out. Besides having the proper levels, the Line Out's are far quieter! Check it out!
• Mix down to the computer. Two-channel cards and input devices are a lot less expensive (I use an Imic) than multitrack and once on the computer you can use software to do noise-gating, compression, and level-normalizing for a more professional sound. You can also turn a single-guitar track into a bigger sound by using a 'stereo' plugin in the recoring or mastering software and panning the tracks to separate sides. Or (really quick and dirty) delay one of the tracks by 15 mS or so compared to the other. That's what I did with the two microphone tracks to create the 'stereo combination' track here: microphones.