As computer hardware has dramatically increased in power over the last few years and music recording software has become extremely affordable (even free in some cases) the demand for plugging a guitar into a computer has increased. Luckily, it's become very easy with some simple cables and software. In this post I'll show you what you need to get it all hooked up right.
The key element to plug your guitar into your computer is a USB guitar cable. These cables have a small sound card inside them that turns the electronic signals that come from your pickups into a digital signal that your computer can process. On one end of the cable is a traditional 1/4 inch plug that every guitar cable has and on the other end is regular USB 2.0 plug. The magic happens with the built in sound card. Before the invention of these cables you had to have other expensive gear to turn the signal from analog to digital, or rely on your computer to do it (which never worked well!).
The second thing that you need is some sort of recording software installed on your computer. Recording software can vary in price from free to thousands of dollars. If you're just getting started with digital music you shouldn't spend too much money on the software side of it since there is a huge learning curve when getting into high end software. Garage Band is perfect software for this and comes already installed on every new Mac. You can download software from the manufacturers, like Sound Forge, for very cheap. The software is necessary to get the guitar's signal to come out of your speakers, without it nothing will happen.
The digital age has dramatically reduced the cost of setting up your own recording studio at home. Plugging your guitar into the computer is just one easy way to get great sound and lay down some simple tracks right in your own home.