I'm not exactly sure this is the right forum for this kind of question but I guess I'll take a stab at asking the question anyways.

I just recently (a little less than a year ago) got into music production and audio engineering. I basically started with FL Studio 7 and up until a few weeks ago fl studio is all i've been using for music production. I just relocated to michigan where I met a friend at work who has his own studio in his house. Live drums live keyboard pretty much live everything. He also gave me three new programs to try and learn since he doesn't really know them very well. Amplitube, BFD 1.5 and Sonar 6xL.

I taught myself almost everything in Fl Studio and I am currently clicking things to see how they work in Sonar and BFD but I just cant seem to GET ANYTHING done. With BFD I understand that you need an asio driver for it to work. SO i downloaded Asio4all. And it still doesnt work...like I hear no sound. I changed my audio output settings to 16bit in sonar? And now I can hear things in sonar but I'm still having problems with bfd. Not to mention I'm like a deer in headlights when it comes to these programs

I have windows vista which is probably a huge problem. I dont hear any sound when I'm trying to make a drum kit and I'm completely lost in sonar. Amplitube is killing me too.

Any help, criticism or basically any words of advice would be nice and helpful. I basically just need a steer in the right direction

sorry if this post is all over the place. I have many problems and it's hard to address them

I'm 18 years old new at this and eager to learn.