Music advice for a MIDI newb?

I've decided that I want to get into making music for Doom. This is partly for enjoyment, but I also want to use it in order to enter a music course at a polytechnic. What is a good program to start getting into making MIDIs? A free program would be preferable, but I'm not overly fussy about it. :)

Your choices are pretty limited as it is. Just use Anvil Studio.

Sekaiju is a better choice than Anvil Studio. Both have their issues, but Anvil Studio is far clunkier and more difficult to make sense of in my experience.

Sony Acid isn't bad http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/acidsoftware



Useful are the



They also have a 350 page pdf manual, which covers just about everything.

Where is Jimmy91 when you need him?

Right here. :P

To be honest, my weapon of choice, Cakewalk Express 3.02, a program that came on a 3.5 floppy with our first Pentium PC, which is about as old as me and hardly exists anymore, probably won't help him much...

I would argue against using Anvil Studio, however. Tried it once and went screaming back to Cakewalk in less than 5 minutes. Haven't tried the program Essel suggested but it seems to be a comparatively simple solution.

I could offer some advice on the musical side of things, though. :)

finale, sibelius, are great composition tools. sequencing in logic is doable. personally I use an old os x program called 'EasyBeat'. It doesn't run on anything after 10.6, but I wouldn't trade it for anything

FL Studio is a really good MIDI making program as well. Even though it's a demo, it has all the functions except saving.

It's not cheap and it's Mac only, so this might not help but I do all of my MIDI in Logic Pro. It takes a bit to set up a GM project and instruments, but you can do so much with it.