For a while I've been watching videos - seeing how people use their MIDI controllers/pads but never really had a chance to play around with something outside of a project. I came across this webapp a while ago and just found it again recently: http://samplestitch.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ . It lets you try to stitch together producers' chops(found out that recreating Dilla's Don't Cry is pretty hard). It also let me know that you make it so much harder on yourself by playing chops on a keyboard, so I ended up getting a midi controller pad.
But after getting the pad I wasn't really any good at playing it, so after a bit of looking I found a guitar hero kinda thing for midi controllers. It doesn't really teach you how to make beats but it is pretty fun to play and helped my drums get tighter. The funny thing is that I only want my drums to get tight enough for me to play them unquantized.
I've also used Synthesia to work on my dexterity playing the keys - just the thing about it is that it doesn't give you any pointers on hand position, making it hard for me since I am mostly on a MicroKORG that has tiny keys. So next on the list is getting the hang of the piano enough to drop some melodies instead of just using my mouse and the piano roll. I really feel like that will improve my workflow a lot.
And hopefully with it will come more complex arrangements.
