making beats/electronic music

[the last donut of the night]

i've been listening to hip hop and some sorts of electronic music (or at least artists who use it a lot in their work) and for some time i've been fooling around with the idea of trying to make some of my own. thing is, i've never had any musical theory training, never played an instrument, etc. but i'd love to at least take a shot at it to see what could become of it, even if it's just for my own curiosity's sake. what do some of you recommend? starting out practicing on FL or some shit like that? (and if so, how do i learn to use it)

[Zanthorus]

I can't say that I know much about electronic music as such, and I'm not brilliant at composition in general myself either, so I can't be sure how much use my advice will be. But the main thing with creating most styles of music is to listen. Take your favourite pieces of music and listen to what's going on - what range of tempos do they use, what kind of instruments/timbres, what sections are there and what order do they occur in (what's the form of the piece)? Once you've got some idea as to some of the tropes of the idiom you want to work in, start writing. It's probably best to start off simple - some basic drum patterns, a simple bass line, a couple of layers on top. Have fun with it. How does it sound? Bland/boring/painful? Don't sweat it, no-one's first try at anything is a masterpiece. More importantly, did you have fun doing it? If the answer is yes, continue as above listening and creating. Composition is like anything else in life, the more you work on it, the better you get.

The only other thing I can comment on - music theory. It is not necessary to learn music theory. Plenty of great musicians in a variety of genre's could never properly articulate what they were doing in theory terms. And learning theory the wrong way - thinking of it as prescriptive rather than descriptive, or thinking that it involves matching up Greek names with different series of notes - could potentially set you back more than just using trial and error to find what sounds right. On the other hand, and this is me speaking from personal experience mind, learning it the right way makes most musical tasks a whole lot faster and easier. If you feel like giving it a go, this (http://www.musictheory.net/lessons) site has all the basics explained in a fairly accessible manner. The important thing is to keep relating it back to what you hear though. If you can explain how a 23/16 over 14/8 polyrhythm works but can't tell if a piece is in 4/4 or 6/8 by listening to it, then you know you've gone wrong somewhere.

[blake 3:17]

FL looks good. I have Sony Acid which can do great things, but I find some of the basic things very counter intuitive and difficult to remember.

Whose beats do you like best? Other than very basic frustrations, Sony Acid lends itself really really easily to repetitive 4:4 music but makes things a little off kilter a real pain.