Uhh, uhhhm, thanx guys, I guess. So I managed, quite easily, to play and record an interlude/intro. It's the trumpet section of ring of f by JC, and it sounds like a piano, not a good piano. Then knowing everything I do about midi, I went and applied some patch, of a brass section, and I played it and it sounds, well, like a piano. And I tried a few other patches, including some of the Hi Q thingys and got it to sound like, well, a piano. It did change sounds when I tried flute and some Japanese sounding thingys, but they are so horrible that I prefer the not so good piano sound. I suppose part of my frustrations have been dealt with in your comments, i.e. get a better engine. Here I was thinking it could be a flat learning curve...sigh!
Funny... yeah, no learning curve is ever flat. It's simply a matter of exactly how steep is the curve?
It sounds like you are not assigning the trumpet sample properly. Piano is the default so that you have sound in a lot of the midi synths. You need to assign the proper sound sample to that midi channel or synth to get the correct sound. Each synth works essentially the same however, the method or process of assigning a different sound to that synth varies depending on the particular synth you are using.
I didn't see, but maybe I just missed it... what synth are you using for your sounds with midi?