I am not familiar with any of this kind of thing but I was wondering if anyone could help me. There is an old program that I want to use called Recycle 2.1 that will not work on anything but OS 9. Is this kind of thing too difficult to do if I have almost no experience?

Many before you have had success; follow the wiki page instructions and you should be able to do it with a bit of patience.

Give it a go for sure. Even me did succeed setting up the emulator.
Music authoring software like Steinberg / Propellerhead may not be the easiest task for a start.
Such software was often targeted at MIDI and SCSI ports, both of which are missing in SheepShaver emulation.
Recycle 2.0 is hosted at MacintoshGarden and was reported working with SheepShaver.
http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/recycle-20
Setting up Recycle should be doable therefore.