By adminI recently started a project of completing 30 songs in 3 months using FL Studio. I’ve been dabbling in it for about a year now but really wanted to commit after getting comfortable with it on a surface level. While I did explore Suno over the summer, I found it to be mostly a toy, if you didn’t have a baseline sound to load into the program.
My plan was to start by making a bunch of songs, at least 5 or 6, and seeing what stuck. The main goal was to explore the deeper features within the FL Studio suite. I wanted to stick with a single soundscape, and eventually, I landed on something I enjoyed after leaning into a lo-fi hip-hop sound using a package I found in FL’s FLEX plug-in. I was a bit surprised by how much I liked making this style of music, especially since it isn’t a genre I typically listen to on a regular basis.
After about a day of work—7 to 8 hours in total—factoring in the time I’d spent on the handful of darlings I’d killed, I had the first song I felt okay about: Link to Track 1.
My philosophy going into this project, and something that inspired me, was something I heard in a YouTube video: you’re going to make a lot of bad music. This first song isn’t great—don’t get me wrong—but that same video (I’ll update if I can find it) encouraged enjoying the process overall. It also emphasized learning from each bad song by identifying something to improve or try in the next one. That’s how I feel about this track: it’s not great, but I learned a lot about mixing and FL Studio from it.
From there, I took what I learned and applied it to the next few tracks I started. After 4 or 5 failed attempts that were either embarrassingly bad or a mix of ideas going nowhere, I finally found something good and worked with it. Once again, I learned a lot, and I can already feel a remarkable improvement within the dozen or so tracks I’ve made so far: Link to Track 2.
For my third track, I had a song by BT stuck in my head called The Emergency from his These Humble Machines release. I wanted to try to emulate that song as best as I knew how at this stage. That process led to a few fumbled tracks, but this one taught me the most so far: Link to Track 3. Along the way, I figured out how to add a few new plug-ins, including an M1, Serum, and an open-source Virus TI emulator called OsTIrus.
Now, as I reflect on the first stretch of this project, I’m finding the whole process exciting and challenging. The progress feels tangible, and even in those moments where the songs are “bad,” they’ve all been important steps forward. I’m already seeing how the things I learn in one track carry into the next, and the improvements are becoming clearer with each attempt. With 30 songs as the goal, I’m excited to see how much more I can push my creative boundaries and technical skills by the end of this challenge.