hey anvil studios is cool, but how do i make a note hold and go up and down at the same time? isnt that called a cresendo and a decresendo? i shouldve payed attention in music class! 
Don't worry about cresendos and and all the crazy band vocabulary. Just put notes on the page and try to get little melody riffs you like, for now. You can also open a favorite midi (.mid) song in anvil and see what its author did. One major thing I got really confused about was the "grand piano" set to "channel 10", which is basically percussion/drums, but you can time them better than Anvil's "rythm" thing, though using the channel 10 thing takes guessing to figure out what note is what percussion instrament...but anyway, this is really long already, so I think I'll stop... but good luck and have fun!
