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Any of you budding musicians know of any very basic music composition software, either online or free download...

all I want to be able to do is lay down some chords, then a melody over the top (e.g. you tap onto a keyboard and it covnerts to a score), then save in music notation format...e.g. for the time when I am at work,a song pops into head, and I want to get it down...

Basic is the key work.

Any ideas?

Have you tried audacity?

just had a quick look at it....looks more like an editing tool to me...I was looking for more of a composition tool, e.g. drag and drop chords onto a score, then input a melody over the top...cheers anyway.

If you've got an iphone or ipod touch, then garage band has just been released for it. £2.99 and frankly it's brilliant

I thought you would pop up ;-)
Garage band would have been the obvious choice, but only have iphone 3g, so no go i am afraid

When you say keyboard, you mean musical keyboard right ?! :)

Erm then no.

Guitar players can use guitar pro to lay tracks - not sure it has "keyboard" as an instrument though (edit, it looks like it might, the RSE has piano),  and it almost certainly won't take a midi/keyboard input and auto score it:    http://www.guitar-pro.com/en/index.php

Oh and its multi format but not free...unless you, well you know, I would say but would expect a torrent of abuse ;)

To be honest I didn't read your first post all the way through, the app would not help you in that way.

I use guitar pro for playing through tabs, but don't really understand the notations and how it all actually works though. I'd imagine you can make it do what your looking for if you wanted too.

My mate gave me a copy, it doesn't look to difficult to download

http://thepiratebay.org/search/guitar%20pro/0/99/0

Think this will do the trick (and it's free);

http://musescore.org/

that looks promising, will have a go later...cheers Jonny...