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Learning FL Studio
experiencing a significant friction in learning fl studio. a feeling of pretty quick exhaustion understanding the software. wondering how the fact I build software affects this - does my brain just try more to understand everything at once? perhaps i’m less content in only understanding the buttons I need, I want to understand the underlying structure and possibilities.
one thing that particularly got me going today was unlinking a specific knob/input on my midi controller from having an effect on something in the software (a link). it was in a particular tab in a pane where I didn’t expect it to be. I hard a hard time explaining to google what this issue was. I also kept getting results from a forum where they only showed you the first 5 words of a response unless you were logged in.
I think part of it is I just haven’t had to learn new software in a long time. Libraries, frameworks, command line tools yes; primary graphics-first complex apps like a video editor or a 3D-drawing application; been a while. And "basically a video editor without video" as I thought, Audacity is not. Timeline view is a small part of it but there’s many more layers and views onto the same data.
what I need: a way to ask the whole app, “how do I undo what I just did? show in each step separately”, and ‘make all these notes .25 seconds long. Programming with AI, particularly with cursor, has really expanded my horizons on what AI-assisted software can be, and this is closer in experience to running a Java game than a video editor.
Also recognizing all new things are hard in the beginning. Noticing I don’t like mixing creative and cognitive tasks in this way - “follow the stream of a cool new melody” and “find the button that toggles off the thing that lets me play it with this other piece” is a very different mode. Perhaps this is why recording takes are continuous and long at first pass.
Also quite grateful fl studio exists - together with my midi controller, seems to do far more than I’ll ever need. It is a powerful piece a software, and there’s wisdom in the design of it even if I can’t see it right away.
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