@allison @meeper regardless of style, i'd just dive heads first into https://reaper.fm if you're looking to do some stuff in a DAW

if you're on windows or you're alright with fiddling with yabridge on linux, Spitfire Labs has a huge collection of sounds that can get you started composing music with good sounding pianos and alright strings etc: https://labs.spitfireaudio.com/

other than those two, most of my experience is in making drum & bass / trance music / whatever electronic stuff

if you wanna do audio synthesis, i highly recommend https://vital.audio

there are tons of free drum samples online that are a quick google search away.

tbh you don't really need to know sheet music to be a computer musician in 2024, but it still helps to know how to read it sometimes for sure. without any prior knowledge, a lot of midi editing can be done in a piano roll view, which is really intuitive. reaper has a sheet music view in its midi editor that you can switch to after using the piano roll too, so you can probably flip between the two and learn pretty quickly how to read Actual Music if you want.