slartabartfast
 
In the traditional music culture, this was initially at least, a sadistic game for children, who were chained to piano stools next to scary old crones and forced to repeatedly press keys in a predetermined order to match the arcane symbols on dusty five lined sheafs for years until they had mastered their meaning and achieved the facility to turn them into songs.

DOH! This explains why, after 37 years, that I still do not take to the piano!
 
"...and thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you’re at it, why don’t you give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?" - Miracle Max

slartabartfast
You have wandered into the nightmare realm between loving music and making music.
 
In the traditional music culture, this was initially at least, a sadistic game for children, who were chained to piano stools next to scary old crones and forced to repeatedly press keys in a predetermined order to match the arcane symbols on dusty five lined sheafs for years until they had mastered their meaning and achieved the facility to turn them into songs.
 
By the mid twentieth century, this tradition had morphed into self-harming teenagers picking up six stringed boxes and struggling for thousands of hours learning to force their bleeding fingers into inhuman contortions that would match the little drawings in their Mel Bay books until they could produce something that might get them laid. 
 
In today's modern world of the future, it has become an inscrutable video game challenge, that requires young masters to hone their skills acquiring the magical tools of the maven's lair that will allow them to create armies of notes out of electricity and send them through the air to the waiting ear of the digital world. 
 
The difference between the music in your head, and the aural ambrosia of the angels, is still a huge commitment of time and effort to learning to use your tools. It helps if you take a systematic approach to that struggle. You can shorten the process if you have a solid understanding of what you are personally trying to accomplish. You can probably skip a lot of the classical appreciation, theory and analysis if you just want to make "beats," for example, but you are going to have to do a lot that seems tedious and unfair in the process of training your questing mind. You do not reach the highest level of any game until you have learned the basic moves and played a lot at a slow pace. And it is easier to grasp the rules and skills of Angry Birds than to master Dark Souls. The thrust of the development of SONAR in the past decade has been toward your style of music and there is everything in X3 that a master of beats would need, but you must struggle to achieve it. 

 
This is a pretty cool post on various levels 
 
But I'm not sure I agree with this: "The thrust of the development of SONAR in the past decade has been toward your style of music." There's been a lot of development along those lines, but I think the production-oriented stuff has an edge...VocalSync, Drum Replacer, linear-phase EQ, workflow enhancements like Smart Swipe and Speed Comping...ARA integration and tempo extraction. That sort of functionality has been pretty prevalent, and adds to the "wide range of projects" vibe of SONAR that lets more people do more...but requires more knowledge to be able to separate the functions not needed for a specific purpose from those that are needed.
 

"little did I know what I was getting myself into after spending all my savings and my bonus from work that I was about to buy something that I would not be able to navigate and use."
 
That is unfortunate, and a mistake many people make who are just starting out in digital recording. They buy an expensive program with all the bells and whistles, and discover just how complicated it is for beginners.
Which is why I always recommend Cakewalk's Music Creator to those folks who ask. I realize it's too late for you, but perhaps someone else will read this and save a few hundred bucks. Then either learn the basics in MC and upgrade later, or quit with a few more dollars in their pockets.

Yulin
little did I know what I was getting myself into after spending all my savings and my bonus from work that I was about to buy something that I would not be able to navigate and use. 

Actually, you CAN navigate and use it...just not immediately. Anyone who buys a guitar knows they will need to take some lessons, or read a book, and they know their fingers will hurt until they build up some calluses.
 
Although as mentioned Music Creator might have been a better choice, SONAR can do everything Music Creator can do. The problem is that it can do so much more and you don't know enough yet to ignore the parts that don't relate to what you want to do.
 
The learning curve is always steepest at the beginning but as you learn more, your knowledge multiplies.
 
 

Anderton
Anyone who buys a guitar knows they will need to take some lessons, or read a book, and they know their fingers will hurt until they build up some calluses.
 

Not true, Craig. I had no idea how much my fingers were going to hurt. 

If you work and study in an organized way, you'll be a reasonably fluent SONAR user in about a year (depending on how different was the software you've used to). That doesn't mean you've learned all its tricks, nor does it mean you can mix or master your products.
The Reference Manual pdf of SONAR has something like 1800 pages. That gives you some idea of the amount of resources and options you're facing. Just watching (and re-watching to comprehend) the numerous tutorial videos and testing the methods yourself will take more like months than weeks.
Have patience! :o)
And do get yourself a controller keyboard. It will make your life a lot easier. You don't mention your audio interface.
If you're trying to work using the integrated sound chip of your computer, you'll get gray before your time.

Brian Walton
Watch these 50 videos of instruction:  
 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKRYWdEpbc5PgUgvrNuSvVyfv5qkll0qj
 

The narrator of these videos used to be on the forum more. These are really good videos. I think they start off a little slow as he focuses on setting up, but they are worth investing some time in to watch, and contains quite a few nuggets worth taking on,

Maybe SONAR only needs 4 knobs.
 
1. Make beatz
2. Make Pro (mo bettah) beatz
3. Collect $ for da beatz
4. Chill out
 

I'M BATTLING WITH EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE

I'M BATTLING WITH EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE