In 1987 I went into business to create royalty free music CD products. MIDI sequencing on computers was in its infancy. To make a long story short, I initially built a MIDI studio in my house. I had racks of MIDI modules, EFX units, a mixing console, a 16 track Fostex recorder, a 2 track Fostex for mixdown, and a Fostex MIDI sync unit between the 16 track and a Mac Plus computer using Opcode Vision. The Mac ran the entire operation, syncing to numerous MIDI modules and my keyboard. It had 1 meg of ram and no hard drive initially. Sequences were stored on 800k disks. The small room was hot as can be. I often worked in shorts and no shirt. I wore headphones 10-12 hours a day. I had stacks of huge analog recording tape. In this environment I created 12 hour long CDs of music in one year as the startup product for this business. I learned as I went along then as there really was little info to learn from. In retrospect, it was one of the best creative times of my life. I often bought a sound module for just a few sounds. I learned to layer strings and brass sounds from different modules. MIDI worked perfectly with the MAC. 

Today the racks are gone and everything has condensed down to keyboard and a computer. I now use Cakewalk's Sonar and various soft synths. 

I do not focus on teaching what products are out there as that changes daily. I focus on teaching the basics of creating music with a music sequencer.