DAWs (digital audio workstations) are intimidating and frequently overwhelming programs. For this reason, it is important to focus on the pieces that are essential for making music.

1) The playlist, aka the piano roll, is the single greatest tool at our disposal. It represents the timeline of our song. The horizontal axis is time. Where audio clips are placed along this axis determines when they start and stop playing. The vertical axis is tracks. We can loosely think of tracks as different instruments. For example, maybe you'll use one track for a guitar, one for bass, and three tracks for drums, perhaps a kick, snare, and hi-hat. Each track sends its audio to an independent channel on the mixer. Usually recording audio is done straight to the playlist, in sync with the rest of the music. Or if there are no rhythm tracks yet, in sync with a time-keeping click known as a metronome.

2) The mixer. The main purpose of the mixer is to control the volume of these tracks or channels, and combine them together into a master channel, which is our song. The ability to raise or lower the volume of channels is the difference between music and a clusterfuck of noise. The mixer can facilitate all sorts of processing and sub-combining of channels, but we won't focus on that for now since it's not essential to making music.

3) Audio clips. Without audio clips the playlist doesn't make sound, nothing is fed to the mixer, and we do not have a song. Often it's convenient to use audio clips recorded by other people. For example, it's common to download drum samples or loops instead of making our own. Other times we record our own audio. It can come from a real instrument or microphone plugged into an interface. Or it can come from a MIDI instrument. One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to get into the habit of rendering or "bouncing" MIDI tracks down into audio clips. Lay down your MIDI track, get the knobs and shit to reasonable positions, and bounce it to audio like your life depended on it. The same largely applies to effects. If you have a kick drum that needs EQing, perform the necessary EQ, and bounce it down immediately. Working with audio clips is a sane process. Having a 100 different midi instruments and effects cluttering up your mixer is pure misery, especially for the inexperienced producer.

To sum things up, no pun intended, if you have a playlist, a mixer, and audio clips, you are ready to make music!