I've been doing this for over 5 years now. I started with Cakewalk Home studio, a PIII Laptop, and a JV1010.
I picked up hudreds of free sequences off the internet. Only a small percentage were usable. I started working with files that had good piano and horn tracks. The rest I started to edit. This is where Cakewalk Pro Audio came in. It has superior editing features.
Once I had a few songs, I had the sequence change patches in my Pod and GR33. Next came Volume changes, effects etc.... (Goodbye pedalboard
) Next came the Effects for vocals. Patch changes, Delay, Repeat etc....
Then I started playing with other musicians occasionaly. So I Muted some tracks, but drummers needed a reference. I had an old drum machine - this became the click track and cue track. Cue tracks gets your attention for Verses, Choruses, Solos, Stops, etc......
When I'm Solo, I needed background Vocals (I got used to them being there). This is where I parted ways with the Laptops (Had to get a backup for gigs), and built a pretty good DAW.
Long Story Short........12 Channel board, Sep Monitor Mix, Wireless headphones, 4 Synths, Patch Bays, various Midi devices including Midi controller, Drum pads, and USB sound devices later.... Well let's just say I don't have to wait for the Bass player to arrive, The drummer to start a song, and the keyboard player to find his sounds.
On the down side, I have to carry everything myself.
Oh yeah, had to build another Computer as a backup.