you need a mic, a decent mixer with phantom power or else you will have to get a mic pre amp, some good monitors, a good set of headphones, and a decent pc, as far as beatmaking gear, thats a whole different can of worms, if you want good quality beats, you are gonna need good quality equipment dont be fooled by fruity loops and reason, even though you can get alot of knowledge from these programs, unless you have a really really good soundcard to produce the samples off of you arent going to meet what we have grown to know as the industry standards....just start looking at equipment reviews to see whats good and what fits your needs, dont be fooled by the "all in one" type set ups, take the yamaha rs-7000 for instance, it is a midi workstation but they crammed it with sounds and alot of functions, so when you get into stuff like that you either compromise sound quality or user interface....cuz the rs sounds like its being played through a cheese cloth filter....but the interface is pretty nice...the triton (keyboard or rack) is a favorite with many people, it is expandable, has very good quality sounds and has good interface, the only bad part is that alot of people use them and if you arent very creative then you fall victim to sounding like everyone else...a nice synth is a good addition, like a nord 2 or 3, an ms-2000, or go for some of the emu stuff....i hope this helped out a little.
