For a professional perspective (remember it's from twitter, so it goes chronologically from bottom to top):

I'm not arguing against understanding - I'm arguing against promoting the idea that the music industry (which includes EDM) is in any way "fair". Zau brought up how "anyone with a computer can download a DAW and 'make a track'" and how they don't think it's fair. I don't want people to expect a fair shake when it comes to being successful, because that's setting them up for failure.

Success is as much about the opportunities you are given (by privileged circumstances or by creating them yourself) as it is the skills and experience you have to help you achieve your goal. Sometimes it's actually more important. If you spend too much of your time worrying about how people who aren't as good as you (which is entirely subjective) are doing as well as/better than you, or in some way cheating the system/devaluing your craft, you'll get jaded and cynical and burn yourself out - leading to giant rants like this that probably make it harder for the person going through it to continue following their passions. Not speaking for Zau in any way, but it would be completely understandable to feel deflated after thinking about this sorta stuff.

In my opinion, it's better to focus on trying to find your niche, and just think about how you can make it as an artist without caring what other musicians do. Again, ear training is going to be super useful and prioritizing it will make your life so much easier in the long run so the original point Zau was making I'm on board with, but I can tell you from experience you don't need it to DJ for a bunch of intoxicated people, and there are genres/tracks that won't care too much about musicality at all. Fans don't care as much about that stuff, and we can't forget that while we spend so much time surrounded by other people who care just as much as we do. Most of them won't even notice.

It is definitely good to do both and neither is inherently a bad choice - there are seriously talented professional who use presets and there are others who make all their stuff from scratch. What's important is making it easier for you. Some people find it easier to start with an initialized patch and build their sound according to their ears and desires, and others scroll through presets for inspiration then tweak and layer.

I think when you're just starting out, you should be fully open to presets - it's gonna be harder to learn how to finish a song than it will be to build a cool synth lead. Teach yourself how to make your ideas conform to the tools you have, so you don't get frustrated at any failures and get discouraged from making more music. You can still lean sound design and create patches, but I'd make that its own exercise: Pick a day out of the week to only make patches, and save a fuckton of your own presets for later.

Keep in mind Laidback Luke only just started learning FM synthesis this month, and I bet half this forum knows more about how it works than he does. It's not a set path either way!

If you need to explain to people why you're special, chances are you're not.  Don't forget, actions speak louder than words, and good music speaks louder than a forum post.

It's under your Profile Settings, in Looks & Layout!

The left brain/right brain thing is actually a myth. We use both parts of our brain for all sorts of tasks, and there is no one specific activity regulated to one half of the brain - just a bunch of different smaller tasks ruled by specific sections of our brain that span both halves. Just google "Left brain right brain myth" for a dozen different articles on it (Same for the Meyers-Briggs personality test, by the way. You're not an ENFP or an INFJ, you're just a person).

We all want to have some simple answer to tell us what category of life we fit in, what kind of person we are, how we interact with people, what our life goals will be, and everything about our existence. It sucks to be ignorant, and we'd rather fit in a box than deal with ambiguity. It's easy to apply labels to everything so you can just go about your day, it's hard to analyze how complex and deep every individual human being's life and experiences have been. I can assure you if you had asked me ten years ago when I was about to graduate high school what I'd be doing with my life, "electronic dance music producer" was nowhere on that list. Keep yourself open and don't trust anyone to try and say you are one thing or you will always be one thing.

Here's my routine for the periods between semesters when I have whole day chunks I can set aside for a specific regiment of practice or study. The general format is two days of practice and experimentation, two days of composition and production. Allow yourself at least an hour for any one kind of activity (I might start shifting the routine I wrote down after this current semester ends to better reflect that as well), and try to let yourself wear different hats at different times. I try to keep the sort of note taking and critical analysis practice separate from the more free roaming experiential practice, just like I try to keep my engineering separate from my songwriting.

The most important things to remember are direction and persistence: If you're not doing it regularly you're gonna forget stuff and lose muscle memory and you'll keep wasting time relearning stuff instead of learning new stuff, and if you don't have some sort of routine or syllabus to follow along you'll end up feeling discouraged by just how much stuff you don't know. The more you break stuff down into smaller steps that lead to a greater whole, the easier the process becomes - it just becomes even more boring and pedantic because you're practicing thirty simple tasks instead of five extremely difficult ones. So stay focused and eventually whatever you were working at will seem as easy as breathing.

Of all the for profit colleges, Full Sail is one of the worst. If you're really interested in pursuing a structured education in electronic music production, I'd look into one of the newer EDM-focused places like Icon or Point Blank. They do on-site and online classes, and will get you people who are explicitly into what you're into and not just "music". You don't wanna pay a full college tuition for that type of stuff, since most of it is just experience-based.

The main reason to go to a school for music is if you want a career in the industry at large, and even then very few schools will provide you with the most important tool you already clearly know you need - networking. I'm currently going to a school to study composition for visual media, and most of the stuff I'm learning through my classes could have been self-taught, to be perfectly honest. The education provides a structure to make things to faster and more efficiently, but my main focus is how most of my teachers are still inside (or recently out of) the film or video game industry and how there are students in non-music majors like animation and motion pictures that my school encourages collaborating with. So I'm developing a portfolio while marketing myself to possible future clients.

Without that, I'd be wasting my money.