Picking Your First DAW: FL Studio

So here you are. You have been spending your whole life listening to music and now you want to know how it’s done. What goes behind the sounds you love to play on your way to work, having a good time with your friends, when nobody else is there for you. You watched a couple “how to make a beat” tutorials online but you’d rather dive in head first….or maybe now you feel like you’re ready to jump in after messing around with on of your friend’s bedroom studios. The first question that is really the most important to start though, is where?

The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is something similar to an all-in-one bundle of a plethora of sounds, synths, Digital Effects, drums, and sometimes vocals neatly packaged into a program that can call up all of these files for you to playback and control.

FL Studio

This is where I started. This is where a lot of people start. A lot of people would consider Fruity Loops, or more recently known as FL Studio, the entry-level program for digital audio production. If you have never touched music before on a creative level this may be a god place to start.

The User Interface is very simple yet robust; after about 10 years of producing in various programs, I can still say I haven’t used every FL plug-in that comes with the installation. This doesn’t mean they aren’t good by far, but the sheer amount of default preset’s a plug-in like Sytrus can have will be intimidating to any fairly new user.

Some of my favorite producers, including Soulection’s LAKIM, use FLS as a primary means of writing music and grainy Instagram videos can tell the tale of somebody’s complex grasp of such a simple tool at face value. FL Studio is a workhorse that anybody with little to no experience or tons of experience can jump into and be entertained by.

In all previous years, the battle for the best DAW was given between Ableton Live and FL Studio. This matters a lot if you want to start making music with a program that has evolved and becomes one of the top 3 preferences among worldwide music producers.

I also write: Picking Your First DAW: Reason