Sixteen years ago this blog was posting Ableton Live tutorials, lusting after a Korg Monotron, and grinding on a Moguai remix competition run by Novation and Ableton for a track on mau5trap. We have receipts. So when somebody asks “how do I start producing electronic music,” you’re not getting a listicle some guy scraped off Reddit who’s never opened a DAW. You’re getting it from someone who’s sat there at 3am wondering why the kick and the bass are fighting.
Here’s the 2026 starter pack. It’s shorter than you think.
The whole pack: a computer you already own, one pair of cheap headphones, one DAW, free synths, and the discipline to finish a single track. That’s it. Everything below is just detail.
Pick a DAW and stop reading DAW comparison articles
There are three real answers and you already know them: Ableton Live, FL Studio, Bitwig. Pick one, commit, ignore the rest.
Ableton Live is the one this blog has run on since version 5, and it’s still the right default for most people. Session view — a grid of loops you trigger live, build arrangements by feel, then drag down into the timeline — is the reason most of us never left. If you want to eventually play out or do anything on a stage, Ableton is where the muscle memory pays off. Move is their $499 standalone groovebox if you want to make music away from a screen — fun, but the desktop app is the one you actually learn on.
FL Studio has the best deal in the entire industry: buy it once, get lifetime free updates, forever. People have been riding the same FL license since 2009. The piano roll is genuinely the best of the three, and half the trap and hyperpop you’ve heard was built in it. The workflow is pattern-and-playlist instead of session view, which some brains love and some hate. If you’re young and broke and making beats, this is probably your answer — and it’s the DAW the bedroom-dubstep generation actually cut their teeth on.
Bitwig is what you buy when you’ve outgrown the idea that a DAW is just a tape machine. Modulators on everything, a modular environment (The Grid) baked in, and clip-launching that out-Abletons Ableton in places. It’s the producer’s-producer pick. Don’t start here, but know it exists for when you get weird.
Reaper’s great and dirt cheap, but nobody’s making dance music in it, so it’s off the list. Anyone telling you the choice matters much more than that is selling you something. They all make the same record. The DAW is a hammer.
The gear you actually need (almost none)
I bought the DSI Mopho. I wrote a whole post lusting after the Korg Monotron. They were great. They also did nothing my software synths couldn’t, and they sat unused more than I’d admit. Hardware is a hobby you graduate into, not a prerequisite you start with.
Here is the entire required gear list to start:
- A computer you already own.
- A pair of cheap closed-back headphones. Not “studio monitors” — your room is untreated and your monitors will lie to you. Headphones first.
- That’s it.
You don’t need an audio interface until you’re recording a real instrument or a mic. You don’t need a MIDI keyboard — the QWERTY keyboard in every DAW plays notes, and you can draw everything into the piano roll. You don’t need a $400 controller. Buy a 25-key MIDI keyboard for $50 later if and when typing notes annoys you.
The single biggest upgrade to your tracks isn’t gear. It’s finishing more of them.
Free tools that are not “good for free,” just good
The “I can’t afford plugins” excuse died years ago.
- Vital — free wavetable synth that goes toe to toe with the paid ones. A beginner on Vital is not handicapped, full stop. (It’s freemium — the free tier is genuinely usable; paid unlocks more presets and extras.)
- Surge XT — open-source, deep, does subtractive and wavetable with a stack of oscillator types. Free forever, no nags.
- Decent Sampler / TX16Wx — free samplers if your DAW’s stock one annoys you.
- The stock plugins — Ableton, FL and Bitwig all ship with EQ, compression, reverb, delay and synths good enough to finish a release on. Records you’ve heard were mixed on stock plugins. Stop shopping for the magic compressor.
- Splice if you want sample packs, but free label packs and the Splice freebies will carry you a long way before you pay.
The trap is spending your first six months collecting plugins instead of making music. A plugin folder is not a discography.
Your first track: finish a bad one
Your first track will be bad. Good. Make it anyway, and finish it — intro, build, drop or chorus, breakdown, outro, exported as an MP3 you could text to a friend. Do not start a second track until the first is exported. The skill you’re actually missing isn’t sound design or mixing theory; it’s the muscle of taking an idea from empty project to finished file. That muscle only grows by finishing.
Concrete starting move: open your DAW, drop a four-on-the-floor kick on every beat, add a bassline that hits on the offbeats (the classic house bassline lives on the &s), loop a 16-bar chord progression on a stock synth, and arrange it into something with a beginning and an end. Steal a structure from a song you love — count its bars, copy the map. That’s not cheating, that’s how everyone learned. Coldplay wrote the same four chords forty times and bought houses with it.
Making DnB or dubstep instead? Same rules, faster tempo and a rolling or sub-driven bass — the finish-it-anyway part doesn’t change.
The remix-competition route we did back in 2010 still works too: grab an official stems pack, rebuild the track your way. You skip the blank-page paralysis because the melody’s already there, and you learn arrangement by reverse-engineering a real song.
Stop researching. Open the DAW. That’s the entire starter pack — everything else is procrastination with a shopping cart.