You open FL Studio for the first time and it looks like the cockpit of a plane. Where do you even start? YouTube gives you a 12-minute video on one knob, and three hours later you still haven’t made a sound you like. A good course fixes that with the right steps in the right order, and the best ones end with a song you finished.

Updated October 2026. Full disclosure: Mix Elite is our school, and until November 2023 it was called FL Studio Tips (FLTips). We checked every other school’s prices and features on its own site on October 7, 2026, and sorted the picks by need: your first song, beats, mixing or free.

Best FL Studio course for complete beginners

If you’ve never made a song, the best online FL Studio course has three jobs: teach the steps in the right order, get you to a finished track, and have someone listen to it. Most picks below do the first job well. Only a few do all three. That’s how we ranked them.

1. Mix Elite: 7-Day Music Producer Course (formerly FL Studio Tips)

Mix Elite is the new name of FL Studio Tips, the school many people still call FLTips. Same team, new name. The YouTube channel still has about 369,000 subscribers, and old fltips.com links now land on mixelite.com. Here’s what changed when FL Tips became Mix Elite.

The 7-Day Music Producer Course is a finishing system. Each day you complete one step of a real track, in the right order, with the sounds and templates handed to you:

On Day 7 you send in your song, and a pro on our team tells you what to fix. Most of the other picks on this list don’t include that. You work about 45 minutes a day, and it all runs on FL Studio’s free trial, so there’s nothing else to buy.

It’s $27, paid once. If you don’t finish a track you’re proud of, you email one word, “refund,” within 60 days and get every cent back.

2. Image-Line: FL Studio’s own free videos and manual

Image-Line, the Belgian company behind FL Studio, keeps its free lessons on its FL Studio learning page. The Getting Started series has 28 videos on downloading, installing, setting up and using FL Studio. After that, the FL Studio Guru series explains features and plugins one by one in 136 videos.

The online manual explains every window and setting, and pressing F1 inside FL Studio jumps to the page for whatever you’re looking at. Just don’t read it front to back. Max’s advice from his free class: “From my experience, when people start to read through those manuals you can really get totally lost, so I personally don’t recommend this unless you’re looking for some specific feature.”

The FL Studio trial is free too. Image-Line says it has every feature and no time limit, but it won’t reopen projects you’ve saved. You can still export your songs to WAV or MP3. New to all of it? Start with what FL Studio is and how it works.

3. Udemy: FL Studio Music Production + Mixing Music

FL Studio – Music Production + Mixing Music – Complete Course is a Udemy bestseller by Tomas George and Ian Alexander. When we checked, it had a 4.7 rating from 6,017 reviews and 38,668 learners, and it was last updated in September 2026.

It’s made for FL Studio 20, 21 and 2024, Producer Edition or higher. Fruity Edition won’t cover it all. Udemy sets prices by country, so check the price where you live. There’s no feedback on your own songs, but the teachers answer questions in the Q&A.

4. Berklee Online: Producing Music with FL Studio

Berklee Online’s Producing Music with FL Studio is a 12-week undergraduate class written by Rishabh Rajan. You program drums, record and edit MIDI in the Piano roll, record audio, then mix and master a piece of your own and even make a video for it.

Tuition is $1,575 for 3 credits. You’ll need FL Studio 20 Signature Edition or higher and an audio interface. The fall class was full when we checked, and the next term starts January 11.

Want the short version? On Coursera, Berklee’s FL Studio Basics has the same teacher and 4 modules, about a week of work at ten hours a week. Coursera marks it intermediate level, and it comes with a Coursera Plus plan.

Best FL Studio course for beat making (trap and hip-hop)

For beats, you want a teacher who builds real drums and 808s on screen, then turns a loop into a full beat. Our pick is again the 7-Day course (#1 above). Day 3 is drums and arranging, and the course page says it’s made for EDM, house, trap, hip-hop and pop.

In his free FL Studio class on YouTube, Max builds a trap beat in the Channel Rack and keeps the rules simple. Hi-hats go on every second step and the kick pattern runs at least two bars. On tempo, Max is blunt: “Trap is usually around 140 and not 130.”

5. Skillshare: Riley Weller’s FL Studio beginners class

On Skillshare, Riley Weller, an FL Studio trainer who also goes by GratuiTous, teaches FL Studio Beginners Course – Learn How to Make Beats in FL Studio. Its 21 lessons walk through the step sequencer, Playlist, Piano roll and Mixer, then spend 48 minutes building a beat from scratch.

Skillshare is a yearly plan: $167.88 a year, which works out to $13.99 a month, and it opens thousands of other classes. Feedback comes from other members in the community, not from a set review by the teacher.

6. Studio.com: Making Beats in FL Studio with KC Supreme

On Studio.com, KC Supreme of Internet Money teaches Making Beats in FL Studio. Across 10 lessons and 5 hours 36 minutes, he makes 7 beats from start to finish, some from scratch and some from loops. Then he preps a beat pack to send to an artist.

It costs $219.99, paid once, with lifetime access. You watch KC make each beat and explain his choices as he goes, so it’s a look over a hit producer’s shoulder.

Best FL Studio course for mixing

Mixing is where first songs fall apart. The kick fights the 808, the vocal floats on top, and the whole thing sounds smaller than the songs you love. Max puts it plainly in his free class: “Mixing is an in-depth process that takes years to master, but today I have a step-by-step framework that you can follow every time you want to make your track sound better.”

A course gives you that framework. The 7-Day course covers it on Day 4 with its Holy-Quad formula (#1 above). What speeds you up after that is a pro hearing your own mixes, again and again.

7. Mix Elite Academy

Mix Elite Academy is our full school, with lifetime access. Inside are 600+ trainings, including an FL Studio beginner-to-advanced class, plus weekly live coaching calls where a pro fixes projects in real time.

Feedback is unlimited and one-on-one. You upload a track to a portal and get an answer within 24 hours, and every coaching call is recorded for you to watch later.

It’s $137 today, then 2 monthly payments of $137. The same 60-day money-back guarantee applies, and unlimited mastering of your songs comes as a bonus.

Best free FL Studio course

You can learn a lot of FL Studio for free. The catch is order. Free videos rarely tell you what to learn next, and nobody listens to your song. These free picks come closest to a real course.

8. Mix Elite’s free 4.5-hour FL Studio class on YouTube

Max’s free FL Studio class on YouTube runs 4 hours 30 minutes and has over 1.5 million views. It follows the same day-by-day order as the paid course, from setup to chords, drums, mixing, vocals and mastering.

You’ll build a trap loop with real chords and a melody, program trap and house drums, and arrange it all into a song of about two minutes. Release and the pro feedback on your song are only in the paid course. Prefer reading? Our step-by-step guide on how to produce music follows the same lessons.

The other free picks are Image-Line’s own videos (#2 above) for learning the buttons, the free FL Studio 21 beginner’s course from Busy Works Beats, and In The Mix for single topics.

In The Mix, Busy Works Beats and other FL Studio course sellers

These schools also teach FL Studio. They’re independent course sellers like us, so they come after the neutral picks, and every fact below is from their own pages. Looking past FL Studio? Our list of the best online music production courses compares 26 schools for every DAW.

9. In The Mix

In The Mix is Michael Wynne’s YouTube channel, with about 1.2 million subscribers. Searching for the In The Mix FL Studio course? There isn’t a paid one. The free videos are the course, starting with the 17-minute Complete Beginner Basics Tutorial, which has more than 11 million views.

His store, inthemix.store, sells plugins and preset packs, not lessons. Reddit’s FL Studio community names In The Mix more than any other channel (see below).

10. Busy Works Beats

Busy Works Beats sells beat-making and mixing classes for FL Studio, Logic Pro and other DAWs. Its FL Studio 21 Beginner’s Course is free and runs about 185 minutes, and you sign up with your email to open it.

The paid FL Studio for Beginners class has 23 lessons for $29.99. Or get it, plus 80+ other classes, with Premium: $19 a month or $228 a year after a 14-day free trial, or $197 once for lifetime access.

11. Production Music Live

Production Music Live (PML) teaches mostly in Ableton Live, but it sells 7 FL Studio classes you buy once. Its Full Beginners Course from Start to Finish in FL runs 5+ hours and is listed at €37.

The Full Mixing Course from Start to Finish in FL covers trap and EDM house mixes. It runs 6+ hours and is listed at €47. Prices showed in euros from our location, and PML had them 30% off when we checked.

12. Sonic Academy

Sonic Academy streams 957 video courses, and its FL Studio section runs from beginner to advanced. FL Studio 21 Beginner Level 1, with James Dymond, takes you from opening FL Studio for the first time to finishing your first track in 2 hours 29 minutes.

It’s £9.99 a month or £79.99 a year for the whole library, and you can buy that one level to keep for £29.95.

13. EDMProd

EDMProd’s EDM Foundations comes in Ableton, FL Studio and Logic Pro versions, and founder Sam Matla teaches the FL Studio one. You finish 4 songs in 4 weeks, or at your own pace, across 130+ lessons and 20+ hours of video.

It’s $97, down from $197, or 6 payments of $25. EDMProd gives you 30 days to ask for your money back. You’ll also need the Serum synth and FL Studio Producer Edition or higher.

What does Reddit recommend for learning FL Studio?

We read the biggest r/FL_Studio threads that ask for the best FL Studio course, from 2020 to 2026, and counted what people named. The same advice keeps coming up. Here it is in our own words, with links so you can read the threads yourself.

What the threads agree on:

• Start free. YouTube comes up in every thread, and In The Mix is the channel people name most, followed by Busy Works Beats.
• Use the manual as a lookup tool. Press F1 on any window to read about it, instead of reading the manual front to back.
• Make things. Beyond videos, the advice that comes up most is to make lots of short tracks and to remake songs you like.
• If you pay, these names come up. FL Studio Tips (now Mix Elite), Udemy and GratuiTous are the paid courses people name most.

Reddit is right. The buttons are free to learn. What free videos can’t give you is a finish line and a pro who listens to your song, and that’s what the 7-Day course adds for $27.

How to choose an FL Studio course: 4 checks before you pay

Before you pay for any FL Studio course, run it through these four checks. The more boxes it ticks, the more likely you are to finish what you start.

On check 4: the free trial has every feature but can’t reopen saved projects. That’s the only catch. If you buy, Max’s advice in his free class is Producer Edition, because it covers everything most people need. Image-Line lists every edition on its pricing page.

Still unsure FL Studio is the right software for you? Read FL Studio vs Ableton first. And if you want to know what to expect week by week, here’s how long it takes to learn FL Studio.

How we checked: we read each course’s own page on October 7, 2026, for price, length, the FL Studio edition it needs and whether anyone reviews your music. Prices change. Treat ours as a guide. Nobody paid to be listed.

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