I want to start making some dumb electronic music. What's good music making software that isn't really limited if I actually follow through and get good at it? The ones I've heard of are fruity loops which is also a cereal I think and ableton which is probably unnecessarily complicated for a beginner. and music mucker by don miguel. where can I get some nice samples or instruments or whatever the fucking? Give me the low down. thanks.

looperman.com has some good samples and you could upload ther and shit.

also, yea fruity loops is pretty cool and easy I think?

fruity loops is p. intuitive/easy to figure out, deffo play around with it.

you might like renoise. here's the tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXuyVKUesbw

it makes most things pretty easy, even if the interface looks like it might be complicated (oh no, effect numbers in hex.) you can try it out for free for at long as you want. only limitation is that you can't render to disk for distribution without paying 58 euros. even the cheapest 'intro' version of ableton is ten euros more. after you used the program for I think 100 hours in total, I think it starts nagging you to buy. that's long enough to get used to it though. this and this were made in it. there's a parallel site with instruments. you can kind of make any sample or set of samples you like into an instrument pretty easy. you can also use vst instruments with it (the expensive ones with the buying, cross-software.) freesound.org has a lot of good samples. getting 101breaks.zip from some mystery internet location might be fun too.

as far as i am concerned, what software you use only matters as far as fancy production values go. you probably already know a lot of this, but here's a list of all the things i'd like to have known to google before i started with music:
- composition: intervals, chords, scales, chord progressions http://www.musictheory.net/lessons (i don't know much of this stuff at all but it's handy)
- effects:
* filtering: lowpass, highpass, for use in shaping bass and kick sounds especially. also used in that annoying dubstep bass.
* compression: make shit louder, control dynamics by 'squeezing' sound. knowing about parallel compression and sidechain compression helped my understanding of compressors.
* reverb: simulated a sound reverberating in a room. makes snare go bang. can get annoying if you use it too much.
* delay: basically useful to know because of the difference between it and reverb
- synthesis: playing around with sine, square, triangle, saw waves is useful. learning to make the generic 'reese' bass kind of helps as a starting point. making some shitty strings out of triangle waves also fun. knowing about envelopes is also extra useful - a lot of information about how something sounds is in the attack and decay, which can be shaped by the volume envelope.
- drums: read anything about drum programming. i haven't read this: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb98/articles/rythm.html but it looks pretty useful and i'm probably going to after i finish this post. drums drums drums. they're everywhere.
- sampling: if you sample anything from existing audio, you want to sample at 'zero crossing' points to avoid an annoying click sound when your sample starts or loops. these are bits where the audio signal crosses zero amplitude. pressing 'z' in audacity finds the nearest one automatically.\
- listening: easily the most important thing. listen carefully to soundsyou like or want to imitate / mess with and try and figure out how they were made or how you could imitate them. listen carefully to how things you made sound, and what changes when you changes things about them. once you've got the technical side of things down, listening can get you a long way.

ok now you know all the things i would have liked to go back in time and tell myself. if they don't teach you anything new, hopefully somebody as lost as i was will benefit. good luck have fun.

That's really helpful man, thanks

renoise looks like a terrifying combination of tracker and DAW. i think i like it!

* delay: basically useful to know because of the difference between it and reverb
- synthesis: playing around with sine, square, triangle, saw waves is useful. learning to make the generic 'reese' bass kind of helps as a starting point. making some shitty strings out of triangle waves also fun. knowing about envelopes is also extra useful - a lot of information about how something sounds is in the attack and decay, which can be shaped by the volume envelope.

there's probably better sources out there but reading "programming the c64: the definitive guide" by raeto west gave me a really good introductory overview of attack/decay and that sort of thing.  i wrote a paper on the c64 sound chip for a CS class so i read that chapter quite a bit, but yeah if you download a pdf of that book and skip to the bit about the sound chip it has a pretty nice although simple introduction to digital music and how it works.  it'd definitely be a good read for people goin into chiptune type stuff but i think it's pretty handy for digital music in general.