Perhaps I should have presented the style of music more clearly.  I appended a song at the end of my original post to limit the genre to a pop rap genre.

A music producer in this particular genre is commonly known to be the creator of the background tracks.  Usually, this includes some sort of beat creation and a four to eight bar harmonic progression, with melodic nuances here and there.

I am steering clear of doing any actual recording because, as you probably know, it gets real expensive, real fast.  It seems to me that a producer of pop particularly pop-rap, will only actually record at the final stage, that is bringing in his star rapper artist to record vocals. I have been in music too long to put any more money into it, without seeing an equal return. 

And actually, this is why the project interests me.  To be able to create a song that you hear on the radio, with limited resources (namely a keyboard, computer and synth module) is kind of neat.  Now, I just need to start looking for that rap star....

Thanks.