A way to put in notes without midi

Its impossible to do anything without midi, to make a song by just creating notes i had to take one of the sample pieces and change it and it seemed to work, no problem, but when i was finished and was gonna record the song that took 6 hours to make because i had to improvise, the original sample piece replaced it and i could not change it back. So what im asking for is a way to manually put in notes without midi on a new piece.