reading audio with arduino

I have LED strips that I would like to control based off of frequencies picked up from a microphone. Ideally there would be six different sections controlled independently, depending on the frequencies that the microphone picks up. Say one pin would be the lowest tones up to a fifth or sixth pin being the highest tones. The LEDs add up to about 10amps and 12V. I have previously powered them using mosfets on the analog side of my UNO, attached to an appropriate power source of course.

How do I add a microphone into the circuit? Will there be other pieces of hardware necessary? I have used a DIY kit with an electret microphone before and hooked it up to a motor which then responded to sound, but it had nothing to do with an arduino, just basically used the microphone as a switch. I would just use that but I'm not sure how to add it in either and I would like to include the arduino so the lights can fade on/off and blink in different patterns instead of just to the beat.

Thank you!

Take a look at this chip.
Does the frequency analysis, you read the digital data and drive your MOSFETs accordingly.

MSGEQ7 7-band EQ chip.pdf (146 KB)

oh this is cool! there are even some youtubes out there showing me how it works. so is this the only other part I would need? Or do I need a slew of resistors and capacitors to make it work?

Thanks for the reply

Just the chip, check out:-
http://skoba.no-ip.org/msgeq7/index.html

Also see:-
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/topic,146044.0.html

awesome tutorial!! so what if I bought a graphic equalizer? could I hook it up to the arduino??

No, a graphics equalizer is in effect a mixer, it's output is a single channel. If you want to use one for your project then you will have to hack inside it and get at the signals before they are mixed together and feed each one of those into a peak detector and then into an analogue input.