This will require a little upfront recording knowledge, but you can find this anywhere on the web these days.
A wise man once said, "Keep it simple stupid." Sometimes it's hard to do that these days with all the options and hearing that this famous producer says do it this way or that. But in all honesty, if you're not a famous producer or engineer, chances are you don't know why it is you do it that way anyway. This is especially true when using software these days that makes it so easy to switch and swap and try this and that quickly. Now, I'll admit that if you're actually micing and recording a drum kit from scratch, the rules change a little bit. But for some amateur engineers, guitarists just trying to get a decent recording of their songs, or simple songwriters, we don't need to go to all this trouble. My entire setup consists mostly of software found for free on the internet. I have purchased a few things to make life easier, but all in all I've spent hundreds less than what a brand new Marshall half stack will cost you...and through the software I have just about any amp I could ever want.
First we need to start with good sounds. My guitar uses passive Gibson pickups, most likely along the lines of Burstbuckers or PAF's. I've heard people say that active pickups will work best for amp modeling because the signal is stronger. But in all honesty I'm not sure it's all that much better than a good set of passive pups. Decent cables will work and clean fresh strings of your choice. If you're using an interface of some type, you want the pickup gain to be strong enough so that you're getting a nice loud signal, but you don't want it to clip....at least until you know why you want it to clip. Add your amp sims or whatever until it sounds good. The same goes for drums. I make the kit sound good to start with, which makes the rest of the process much easier. There are plenty of tips and tricks that can be found on forums across the interweb or youtube. Test out different things until you find something that works for your ear.
Now on to a few more details. For guitars, I use Peavey Revalver MKIII as a shell program to host it's amps (this one might cost a little, but I was fortunate to be given a copy) and outside amp sims, like Lepou's amp sims (free - see the link to the side.) I use Revalver this way because I like the sound of the IR loader, or speaker cabinet simulation (there are free IR loaders out there that work great). If you're using guitar amp simulators, just plug it in and think of it like you would a real amp, only this one is in your vst chain. You have your amp, your cab, and your effects. If you can get a good tone through your real amp, all you need is basic mixing knowledge to get a decent tone from an amp sim (although some are better than others). And with all the options of free sims out there these days, you can get REALLY good tones. In fact, most people (even guitarists that won't admit it and say "sims will never sound like the real thing") can't hear the difference between real and sim when done well...and it will cost you nothing.
The only real recording knowledge you need is how to setup tracks like a real studio. Most studio rhythm guitars are 2 or 4 separate playthroughs. I usually use 2 playthroughs, one for the left side and one for the right. I then double them to make 4 tracks total. Pan them somewhere around 100%Left, 80%Left, 80%Right, and 100%Right. This will differ based on your tone and volume. I tend to use 1 amp instance for each track with all four guitar tracks using 4 seperate IR's (Impulse Responses) for the speaker cabinet simulation. After that, EQ is recommended as a high and low pass filter at least. You get rid of the high's to remove unwanted fizzyness and the lows to get rid of frequencies that can interfere with the bass guitar. I don't like mid scooping very much, but if that's your cup of tea, do a notch filter. Most DAW's will come with a decent EQ to get you started with this stuff. If your ear is good enough, you should be able to tell what you like and dislike. If I'm feeling froggy, I might send the 4 tracks to rhythm guitar bus for a little extra verb or something to help it sit in the mix a little better.
I use the same basic principles for bass guitar except that I tend to use two tracks. One with Ampeg SVX (free version) bass amp simulation for the lows, and then a guitar amp (I'm loving Lepou's lextac blue channel for this) for some highs and string noise. It's usually easier for me, not being a bassist really or knowing that much about mixing bass, to get my final bass eq after I've got a drum track and guitar track. This leaves me the ability to EQ around those parts, to add and subtract frequencies where they are needed to fit the other tones.
My drums are handled with Steven Slate drums EX. I picked this up not long ago for $20 on sale. It generally go's for around $99. This program sounds great out of the box. But to get it so sound good in the mix, you need a little more than that. I send the output to a separate track for each drum in my daw. Each drum is then EQ'd, gated, compressed, reverb-ed, etc to my taste (it might be best if you do your own reading up on drum mixing for more details). It's then send back to a master drum bus with more reverb and compression to pull it all together. Plugins of note that I like using for this process are Stillwell's 1973 EQ and Major Tom Compressor and Bootsie's Density MK II and Epicverb. The bus uses Epicverb to add a little extra verb than what you get from the room mics, Major Tom adds a first stage compression for a slight "pumping feel" and then a light touch of Density MKII brings it together as a whole. The only real headache of doing drums this way is the endless hours you can spend tweaking the midi note placements. But I actually kind of think it's fun and it really doesn't bother me that much like it does some people.
So this really isn't that much work yet. My philosophy of "keep it simple stupid" means that I save these tracks as templates or presets after they are individually sounding good. After that just bring up the volume levels. Although some settings will need to be adjusted, at this point, you should have a fairly decent sound and you didn't have to send kick and snare to a bus and do crazy routing things to do parallel compression and such. Last but not least I do a little more eq if needed on the master track, a limiter to bring the volume up, a tape simulator for some saturation and more compression to glue it all together. I actually prefer to mix into this final compression instead of adding it after the fact. I also don't use a lot of compression on any one compressor. I tend to stay around 4:1 or less on all of them.
While using more advanced techniques is of course the goal, it's not hard to get a good sound without them if you start with good sounds. I know this explanation isn't going to give anyone a step by step process, but it explains my theories a little behind the recording I'm currently working on.
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