hEY chrono sorry i took so long to reply, about vst's i suggest you leave them joints alone, they're more for like disco - and i doubt you'll find true great sounds out of them - you can but all that tweaking and adding effects is a pain in the backside and they're just plain time consuming,
what comes with fl studio is all you'll need. the fl keys in fruityloops will give some great piano sounds specially if compose your melody with chords, it has fl slayer a guitar synth - dx 10 an fm synth, simsynth live <- love this. and it also has a speech synthesizer and one bad ass vocoder plugin, dont know what a vocoder is? think - california knows how to party, in the city, city of compton, yup vocoders give you that sound to voice. But there's one thing you can never truly get from no vst's is ya kicks, snare, hi hats, shakers - these ma man i suggest ya get acid 4.0 and chop them out of tracks, or my complete suggestion banginbeats.com - i think its like $10 a kit - i suggest every $10 you can spend you buy a kit and put together a great library. I've never been disappointed by the kits they have - like butta baby. And the ultimate complete thing that you got to get is the soundfont player in fl studio cuz it comes with a demo and you wont be able to save - i think it cost like $30. But this is all you'll need beside the drum kits from bangin beats, soundfonts are like a major collection of sounds spread across the keyboard and compressed to one file called .sf2. So let me clarify, lets say i get a korg- and i want to create a .sf2 right. I record each sample from the korg, so say i record an octave each, c5, d5, e5, etc. Then with the available free software i record each sample the exact way i did from the korg, so i would record the c5 sample, to trigger when i press the c5 key and so on and so forth, so the sound you get from a .sf2 is realistic its not generated like a vst instrument. Soundfonts usually vary - you got soundfonts that are set to trigger drumploops, drumkits, piano, guitars, and many more - check out hammersound.net and you'll see that .sf2's are the way to go, you can click the Krzy Link below, go to my site at soundclick and listen to I Say Baby, every instrument in this track is .sf2. The 7 seven cd set that I am selling is only a convenience really you wont have to spend days, downloading cuz soundfonts are free, but if interested i am selling the set for $40 - shipping included to the us and canada email me if interested. Hope I hELPED
Oh I forgot to mention a couple things about the trouble with percussion, first - the default samples are garbage, they don't sound good when you play them back in a cd player and the sounds are very recognizable, if you use them everyone's gonna say "oh you using fruityloops" and you dont want that, makes you feel cheap and doesn't go well with the self - esteem. The kits from banginbeats should solve the problem oh and you should check out beatsbymail.com - register with them for like $1 a week and they send you a zip file to ya email each week with about two or three kits - this is also butta too. But if these kits doesn't soothe your needs, there's an article i think its in illmuzik.com not sure but do a search, its on mastering where you learn about each frequency on a equalizer and what they do to sound, when ya building ya beat make sure you separate each sample into categories across the fx panel, bass should have its own, snare its own, hi hats its own, and so on.... And for each fruity has a parametric eq <- my favorite tool mad complicated, but if ya read that article and know it like the bible, that parametric eq is so powerful - its guaranteed to shape any sound you send to it, to master quality, but you gotta know ya frequencies though dawg, so, search for that article study it well or experimenting also works. And then theres bass boost plugin this is real good once you tweak your kicks/bass with parametric eq, this plugin is good for "rounding" the bass and give that rumble that makes the head bop.
hope i helped
anything else you need my advice on, just ask away