Learn music production to finished tracks in six months
Six months of daily work — 45 minutes a day inside one DAW — gets a beginner from never having opened production software to five complete, mixed, exported tracks. Roughly 130 hours total. You will not be releasing on a label. You will know how to take an idea and finish it, which is the actual skill.
6 months · ~130 hours · ship five completed, mixed tracks
1.Pick one DAW. Stay in it.
Ableton Live for electronic, hip-hop, beats, and live performance. Logic Pro if you are on a Mac and want to record bands or score to picture. FL Studio if you are on Windows and your reference tracks are trap or pop. The choice matters less than the commitment — switching DAWs after month two is the most common reason people never finish anything. Buy the cheapest tier (Ableton Intro $99, Logic $200 one-time, FL Studio Producer $200) and ignore plugins for at least three months.
$99–200 one-time; Logic comes free with new Macs
Ableton Live →2.The official manual, cover to cover
Every major DAW ships with a written manual that no one reads and a built-in lesson series most people skip. Read the manual. Do every built-in lesson. This sounds obvious and almost no one does it — they jump to YouTube tutorials in week one and spend the next six months working around features they don't know exist. Two months of nothing but the manual is faster than two years of fragmented YouTube.
Free, included with the DAW
Ableton Live manual →3.In The Mix on YouTube + finish one track per month
Michael Wynne's In The Mix channel is the cleanest free production curriculum on YouTube — over a million subscribers, no upselling, covers DAW-agnostic mixing, mastering, and arrangement. Watch one video a day. More importantly: every month, finish a track. Bad tracks. Short tracks. Two-minute loops. Export them, name them, save them in a folder. The number of finished tracks is the only metric that matters in the first year.
Free
In The Mix →If you want a paid, structured path
Replace step three with Andrew Huang's Complete Music Production course on Studio.com. It is genre-agnostic, taught by one of YouTube's most respected producers, and runs about $300. The benefit is sequencing — Huang puts the topics in the right order and gives you projects to ship. The cost is that you still need to translate his examples into your DAW. Worth it if you have the budget and you tend to wander without structure.
Why this path
Most beginners buy plugins they cannot use, watch genre-specific tutorials before learning their DAW, and never finish a song. The bottleneck is never gear or knowledge — it is the gap between a one-bar idea and a three-minute exported file. The manual teaches the tool. In The Mix teaches the craft. The monthly deadline forces you across the finish-it boundary, which is the only place real learning happens. Pick a DAW, read its docs, ship five bad songs, and you will be further than 95% of bedroom producers in their second year.