Somewhere in Los Angeles there is a producer with a stack of Future Bass credits, a sample-pack business, and a role in one of the more improbable origin stories in recent SoundCloud-era pop, and almost nobody knows his name. He goes by Elation. His management contact is a Gmail address with the letters "FL" tacked on the end, a nod to FL Studio rather than any legal identity. And since 2019 he has been the single most consistently credited name behind Christian Gates.
The Beat Nobody Knew Was a Hit
The story Elation tells about his own biggest placement starts, fittingly, as an accident. In December 2019 he wrote a beat and uploaded it to a separate, anonymous SoundCloud account, the kind of quiet upload producers make dozens of times a year expecting nothing back. Five months later, in April 2020, Christian Gates found it and asked to use it. Elation recorded and engineered the vocal takes Christian sent back, and when a verse was left open, Christian asked him to fill it himself. The result, released that August as "Fuck You," became Elation's first documented viral placement, later confirmed by his own tutorial video to have crossed a million Spotify streams and 1.1 million TikTok views.
"a song i wrote with a friend of mine christian gates just hit a million streams on spotify... originally the beat was written in december of 2019... fast forward about five months later in april christian hit me up asking if he could use the beat."Elation, YouTube tutorial
That anonymous beat drop landed right before Christian's breakout. "Lost," from the same Elation-produced early catalog, passed 5.3 million Spotify streams that May, and by June Christian had his first viral TikTok moment, the beginning of the arc chronicled in The Christian Gates Come-Up. Elation, in other words, was in the room, or at least in the session file, before there was an audience to speak of.
From Tutorial Channel to Trusted Collaborator
None of this happened by accident of talent alone. Elation began posting dubstep to SoundCloud in late 2011 as, in his own description, a "fun project," then pivoted around 2015 toward the melodic, chord-forward style that would become known industry-wide as Future Bass. That shift ran parallel to his "EDM Remakes" YouTube channel, on which he broke down hits by Martin Garrix, Hardwell and Tiesto in FL Studio and gave the project files away for free. The tutorial-first, monetize-later model became his defining strategy, and it is the direct pipeline through which he met Christian Gates, whose ONErpm signing bio states plainly that "Gate$ recorded his first album in 2019 with top EDM producer Elation."
He taught his entire process on camera for free, then built a career almost nobody outside one artist's fanbase would recognize by name.
A Name Five People Share
Untangling the credit is genuinely difficult, because "Elation" is not a name this producer owns alone. A UK dance-music promotion outfit runs near-identical handles, elation_music and @elationmusicofficial, and claims unrelated portfolio work with Joel Corry and David Guetta. A New Orleans company called Elation Entertainment operates separately again. The correct account, elation-sounds, explicitly lists itself as affiliated with Christian Gates's own SoundCloud, the clearest identifier in a crowded field. Genius calls him simply "an EDM Producer from Los Angeles, California." No legal name has ever surfaced.
The Architecture Behind No Strings Attached
By the time Christian Gates released his 2024 debut, No Strings Attached, Elation's role had shifted from anonymous beat supplier to something closer to sonic architect. Christian credited him directly with holding the record together across genres.
"After I wrote 'Freak', that track really set the direction for the production of the entire album. Elation and I started using similar samples and effects across the project to create a more cohesive sound."Christian Gates, Hashtag Magazine
Elation's fingerprints show up on "Skitzo," "Trust Me," "Fade Away," "Freak," "BABYDOLL," and on "TOXIC," the Dutch Melrose collaboration examined in The Three-Year Story Behind TOXIC, credited alongside Grant Sayler. Notably, Christian's biggest single, the RIAA-gold "NUMB" detailed in How a Valentine's Day Voice Note Became a Gold Record, is not his work; that one belongs to Sayler and writer Jonathan Bach. Elation's footprint is deep rather than broad: the full run is logged on The Christian Gates Discography, and outside it his only other verified placement is a featured credit on Ajax's "I Love You."
The Trade-Off
Elation runs a sample-pack storefront, Elation Sounds, self-distributed rather than routed through Splice or a label, and he appears to have no publisher, no PRO affiliation, and no manager beyond himself. It is a career built entirely on visible technique and invisible identity, a producer who taught strangers his whole process on camera while keeping his own name out of every credit line that matters. His philosophy, stated in the same tutorial that revealed the "Fuck You" origin, doubles as a mission statement: you shouldn't stress over having the highest possible production quality, he said, because if people like the way it sounds, they're going to listen to it. Millions of streams later, on someone else's songs, they did.