Frustration cubed

Very, very tired. I've spent three hours trying to do just one (apparently) simple task on 3D Max. The frustration has given me a headache. All I wanted to do was assign a different colour to each side of a cube. Couldn't do it. The Help isn't particularly helpful because I don't know how to phrase the question since I'm not familiar with the nomenclature. What's going to happen when I need to assign sound to the faces?

What I have so far is a model of the cubes within a larger cube. The larger cube will open up, throwing out the smaller cubes — I'm going to have to come up with a name for this thing — whilst in the midst of the 'chaos' and noise there'll be what I call the Cosmic Cube that the user will use to control the environment. Well, that's the idea. I still have to figure out how to use this programme and then it's on to Visard and making the whole thing interactive.

I live in hope.