please share tips and tricks about making music!

hello there, i have been trying to learn how to make music using fl studio, for the moment i am trying to focus on simple rap/trap beats. i am having issues continuing and manifesting my ideas because sometimes i have no idea what i am doing. something i really love for now is taking a sample and transforming it to a beat but that has been like dark magic for me, i fail at every level once i am on the software, i could whistle or hum the type of feel i want but i never succeed on putting it to work. of course YouTube tutorials were my first stop but i feel like i am missing something, i am making this thread for the more experienced people out there, you perhaps understand my plateau and can help me advance further. many thanks!

I can't give much advice, other than: Study things and analyze the music you already like, it's this, and over time you can get how things connect to each other. Here are some books that really helped me: https://archive.org/details/the-complete-musician-steven-g-laitz https://archive.org/details/pdf-william-e-caplin-analyzing-classical-form_compress https://archive.org/details/Jazzology https://archive.org/details/TheBeatlesCompleteScores There's also this weird old VHS video that is 2 hours long that teaches how to do professional sound mixing, which is very useful for hip-hop and electronic music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEjOdqZFvhY I hope any of this helps. Good luck.

>i could whistle or hum the type of feel i want but i never succeed on putting it to work. why not just do that? if you're already obsessed with transforming samples with filters and sidechains and whatnot then i bet you could get non zero out of distorting the fuarrrk out of your own voice samples. people always act like they can't make music because they don't know how but i feel like this is an arbitrary barrier, you make music all the time even when you're just humming it. you don't need someone to tell you what to do in order to express yourself.

Are you trying to make midi music that just uses instrument samples? If you don't have a midi keyboard to play your music in, you can just use the "piano-roll" interface (if your software has one) to enter everything in with your mouse. Tedious, but it works fine. Track 10 is for the drum stuff. You use other tracks for separate instruments, like one track for bass, one track for a chord instrument like strings or organ, one track for a melody instrument like piano or vibes or whatever. Once you have all the parts written, you can assign them to whatever instruments you want. If you don't like how the electric bass sounds, change it to acoustic bass or whatever. After you have everything sounding the way you like, you can make an audio file from it. But keep the midi file, because it has all the details of everything. You can print music sheets from the midi file too, if your software allows it. I made a lot of music that way using 12-step Cakewalk Studio, but they went out of business. The midi files are still good for any program that understands midi format. On Linux, there's a program called Rosegarden that has a piano-roll interface. It can use the Fluidsynth sound fonts that have all the instrument sample. You might have to dick around with Qsynth to tell Rosegarden to use Fluidsynth, not that hard. If you run your mouse down the virtual keyboard on the piano-roll interface, and sound comes out, your cooking. Sorry, I don't know anything about FL Studio. In case you just want to record actual audio, like if you sing or play an instrument, you can use Rosegarden for that, too. The biggest problem with that is finding a quit place with good acoustics to record in. Then you can do stuff like make midi backing tracks with bass, drums, rhythm/chords, and record your own playing or singing alongside them. Then you get all the volumes, pans, eq's and effects the way you want them, and make an audio file. To record high quality audio straight to your computer, all you need is a good cheap mic like Shure SM57 or SM58 and an external interface like Scarlett Focusrite 2i2. If you want to play a midi instrument into your computer (and software), make sure to get one with a midi instrument input as well as mic inputs. If you want to be able to mix your music accurately, you can wither get a set or headphones made for that purpose, or a set of monitors. Those connect to your external interface, too. There are incredibly talented world class composers writing movie scores whose entire setup consists of a computer, a midi keyboard in front of it, a set of monitors behind it. and an interface to connect them to the computer. And the computer software of course.