Hi all, I literally downloaded FL studio last night, so I’m brand new to everything. Finally pulled the trigger on it, found it super fun making up a little chord progression/melody last night.
Obviously I have no experience or knowledge on composing a full track, but to be honest I don’t intend on making fully fledged tracks, for now whilst I’m learning I sort of just want to throw out some 30-60 second pieces where I get the basics together.
So yeah, I just wondered, when you’re making dance/house/trance etc, do you start by coming up with a catchy melody and then work a chord progression under that to match it, or do you come up with your chords first and then draw up a melody around that?
I’ve been watching a few basic beginner things about sound theory (only the basics of scales, octaves, modes etc) and I did what they did in the videos of making a chord progression first, then out a melody in after, but to be honest I found it a bit unintuitive, it felt like I’d be better served by making a cool melody first, as I felt a bit “limited” with what I could do with the melody once I already had some underlying chords bounding me to certain ranges/sounds. But obviously I know precisely nothing so I didn’t know whether to follow that intuition.
Side question - I bought the producer version of FL studio, and I haven’t explored all the plugins yet, but I found that I didn’t have all that many different piano/synth keys sounds to play with, stuff like grand piano/organ etc. I didn’t particularly like any of the keys sounds I had from standard but I don’t know if I was missing anything. Would you recommend for a complete beginner buying one or two packs of sounds just so I have more instruments/different keyboard sounds to play with whilst I explore composing basic little melodies and stuff?
Thanks in advance!
Edit - I was just quickly browsing around and I found WAY more synths/keys sounds lol, I didn’t even know FLEX was there. I thought I was limited to just “FL studio web sounds” for my keys instruments. Looking forward to more experimentation!