Well I've been watching a lot of tutorial movies from DVDs and the internet, and I bought two books for the software. I've only been lightly messing around with it but with just a few hours of tutorials I can already see a lot of great tips and shortcuts that I never knew. I've found a strength in playing almost all my instruments, including drums, manually with my MIDI keyboard then using quantization to fix the sloppiness. It makes my pieces sound more "human" by having realistic velocities.
I signed up for a month subscription to Groovebox which has a vast collection of tutorial movies for different software including Logic, Reason 4 and FL Studio, so I'll take another shot at using FL Studio later. After all, I have that East West Symphony pack Lucifer told me about, and of course I bought Sytrus and have barely touched it
As far as I know you can't add VST plug-ins to Reason, so I can't use them.
That being said, I discovered that Propellerhead (makers of Reason) have released ReBirth, arguably the very first software synthesizer, absolutely free of charge. I used to use ReBirth religiously back in high school around '96-97, and you can wire a ReBirth device into Reason using Rewire, so I'll be using that tool as well.
For Reason I picked up a few Refill packs including NES Fills which allows you to make music that sounds like it came from the NES.
