I also use FL Studio. A tip I have for people struggling with drum patterning (which is not something I struggle with as I'm a drummer), is to lay down drum patterns in the playlist like this:

<snip>

instead of laying drum patterns down in the piano roll like this:

<snip>

and this:

<snip>

Laying your drums down in the playlist, like I did in the first example, really pushes you to be creative. Force yourself not to copy and paste a loop of drums, but rather lay down the drums in the playlist separately for every part of the song. This allows you to fit every little drum hit exactly how you want it, without wasting a bunch of patterns.

The first example drum pattern sounds like this. The pattern doesn't get stale because it changes throughout the loop. That being said, it still has a consistent groove to it. Adding little percussion blips and bloops here and there really spices up this pattern.

The second drum loop sounds like this. Evidently, the first pattern is way better than this one. This pattern gets boring after a while, due to the lack of variation. I didn't force myself to be creative with this one, I didn't add any little sounds that could spice up the loop, and I didn't even bother to add fills, or any extra percussion for that matter.

Force yourself to be creative with your drum loops. It can really make or break a song.

Hope this helps!

I always thought people who did this in FL were wasting their time, but you actually have a really really good point. I think I'll give this a go.

Don't layer patches that cover the same frequency range. Mess around with octaves to find which combination sounds good, and make harsh EQ cuts so that each patch is playing a very specific frequency range, with gentle slopes as dilly said though.

-Keep up my goal of finishing & releasing at least one track per month. (haven't released any tracks in the past month, but finished 3 so whatever)
-Get onto a decent sized blog/promo/label

Spending at least 20 minutes on a new loop each day has proven invaluable to me.

It's traught me
1) That you don't need to put all your eggs in one basket (ie working on a loop for days trying to improve it instead of just making a new one that you actually like)
2) That ven if you only work for a short amount of time, there are still plenty of things to learn.
3) How to improve my workflow and get the bones of a track down in a substantially shorter amount of time than I used to be able to.
4) To spend time on things that will have a noticeable difference on the track instead of endlessly tweaking knobs.

I've improved so much more over the past few months than I did for whole years previously. All thanks to Sam Matla's August loop challenge over at EDMProd.com

I played guitar for years before producing. I think it helped me in certain ways like knowing how to time things and arrange elements, but it also hinders me sometimes because I'll really want to record guitar for a track but aren't good enough anymore/don't have the appropriate setup to do so.