nWn

The more you pay, the more you get, so to get an optimal advise I need to know your budget. If you go for the good sounding stuff, a sequencer will do the job. You can try something out of the Sonar line, or Reaper, a cheaper, but nonetheless very flexible and it'll probably cover your needs (for the sounds at least). For the sounds themself you should buy a decent ROMpler. They range from the budget types (Garritan, EWQL Silver Orchestra), to near-realistic orchestra emulations (EWQL Platinum, Vienna Symphonic Orchestra). And for the sheet music, you can't do that properly with most sequencers, so Finale Printmusic will do the job. Finale can also be used to get your sounds, but sequencer like Sonar and Reaper offer far more flexibility, resulting in better sounding songs. I use Sonar 4 Producer Edition with the Vienna Horizon Opus library, but I'm a lucky boy (my uncle used to be a hobbyist composer, until he got to busy with work, and that gave me the oppurtunity to buy his stuff really cheap :)). You can't hear an example of my music, since I still suck ;), but if you have any further questions, feel free to PM.

Well, I do think that. At the moment alot of research is going up about the subject "talent", and the more we know, the clearer it becomes that talent isn't what we think it is. For instance, some 40 years ago, a Russian psychologist wanted to test this, so he decided to train his 4 year old daughter in maths. His daughter, however, preferred chess, so he made her into a chess player. These days, she, and her two sisters and son, are the top of the chess world. Whats even more interesting is, that by training and devotion, her brain turned upside down, and the part we use to analyse faces, is used by her to analyze the chess board, which enables her to figure out her next step within a few hundreds of a second, and she experiences it as "inuitive". This experiment has been repeated (think the William sister, tennis), and I think (this isn't scientific proof anymore), that the more you train yourself in a certain skill, the better your brain organises things, and uses other than normal areas of it to complete the challenge, cause its more effecient. One last thing, music, and most other creative arts, are thought up in the right side of the brain. The right side, however, is dominated in a certain level by the left brain, which limits the creativity. The so called "savants" often have left brain damage or malfunction, and that can lead to extraordinary creative skills. The brain of a savant does work in rather other way than a normal brain, but as stated before, the same thing, in a certain level, can be achieved by training, lots of training, devotion, and so on. As a conclusion, I think talent is the time it takes for a individual to "configure" his/her brain to the task required. This, however, can be achieved by everyone, so in theory (well, my theory atleast ;) ), everyone can be Beethoven, some will just have try a little bit harder.

Something like this :)

I'm a Sonar user these days, but I've got some experience with FL, and yes, there is a way. Just double click the Lower Pane, and draw a velocity curve EDIT: I reinstalled FL Studio, and made a short movie of how its done http://www.nwn-music.com/tsep/VC.rar The video is created with Screen2exe, so its an .exe file (for keeping the size small). It DOESNT contains any virusses, but scan it if you like. Cheers!