I just bought a PC for the first time and I want to buy some software to record music on it and I'm not sure what to get. When I had a Mac I used Garage Band and that was great for my purposes. I'm looking for something similar to that. I mainly want it to sketch out ideas and see how things sound.

audacity is a solid recording tool. good for sketching, and its free

I've always really liked Adobe Audition, or Cool Edit Pro as it used to be called. Really pretty simple to use, great for multi-tracking and mastering, accepts most audio file types, and there are a lot of free/cracked versions floating around the internet.