DJ vs Production to begin with

[MDU]

Connected to Onkyo AV reciever and sounded spot on (well for now!) Happy to carry on this way until I get much better at DJing.

I think 90% of the effort is in picking the right 2 tracks (based on my limited knowledge) the mix will just roll if the 2 tracks are a good match... right?

Used virtual DJ for a bit and then went onto traktor and pretty much hated it... It's almost too complicated (at first glance) and seems to have less functions than virtual DJ! I'm pretty sure it is easy enough to use - i just need to work it all out. How long do you think it should take me? I've only been fooling around for about 1h so far!

[alencr]

For speakers - if you want to stick with producing a little more than djing - get some active monitor speakers, like the Yamaha HS / HSM series, they work well and aren't the most expensive. You probably won't grow out of them for a long time. If you do - Adam monitors. I'm by no means an expert in music production and don't actually own monitors, but when I listen to my tunes in at least a decent studio (with good monitors and a treated room), I hear all the things that are wrong about how my tune sounds - this is the mixdown.

So - for production, the main things to start learning apart from composition and making sounds (ADSR) are gain staging and mixdown. Also, sample selection is king.
For a beginner don't worry about how your music sounds, just watch some tutorials and try and remake some tunes you love, even if they don't sound the same just copy them till you get comfortable with composition and the types of sound they used. Freesound has a lot of free samples, and check out Musicradar for nice sample packs. And don't worry about external vst plugins - FL studio has a lot of good stuff already in it.

Good luck and sorry for the long post haha.