Somewhere on YouTube there is a video from December 2020 in which a producer who goes only by Elation narrates, in flat first-person detail, how an unfinished beat he uploaded to a throwaway SoundCloud account turned into a song called "Fuck You," a song he ended up singing on, engineering, and eventually watching cross a million streams. That video is close to the only interview Elation has ever given. It is also the clearest window anyone has into how Christian Gates built his earliest catalog.
A name with five owners and one real identity
"Elation" is a crowded handle. There is a UK dance-promotion outfit running near-identical social accounts, a New Orleans entertainment company, a London label dating to 2006, even a Christian rock band that borrowed the word as a title. The producer who matters here operates as elation-sounds on SoundCloud, an account that explicitly lists itself as affiliated with Christian Gates's own page. Genius calls him "an EDM Producer from Los Angeles, California" who started writing dubstep in late 2011 as a self-described "fun project" before drifting, around 2015, toward the melodic, chord-forward style the industry now files under Future Bass. ONErpm's official signing bio for Christian Gates corroborates the link directly, stating that "Gate$ recorded his first album in 2019 with top EDM producer Elation." His real name has never surfaced. His only public contact is a personal email ending in the initials FL, a nod to FL Studio rather than to any company.
Teaching the tutorial, then living it
Elation's other defining project was an "EDM Remakes" YouTube channel, where he broke down hits by Martin Garrix, Hardwell, Tiesto and Justin Mylo and handed out the FL Studio project files for free. That tutorial-first instinct became his actual career strategy: teach the technique publicly, monetize the byproduct. It is also, almost by accident, the mechanism that connected him to Christian Gates.
A beat written in December 2019 and shelved on a second SoundCloud account became, five months later, the song that taught Christian Gates how to feature a stranger on his own record.
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 and i actually uploaded it on soundcloud on a separate account, fast forward about five months later in april christian hit me up asking if he could use the beat, pretty soon afterwards he sent back a couple takes of all the vocals and asked me to engineer them.Elation, YouTube tutorial
Elation adds that a verse was left open on the track and Christian asked him to fill it, meaning the producer who taught strangers how to make beats for free ended up as a credited feature on "Fuck You," the song he'd built almost as scratch material. That single small favor, licensing a shelved beat, sits at the root of a catalog that would eventually include "Skitzo," "Lost," "Trust Me," "Traumatized," "Arson," "FREAK," "BABYDOLL" and "TOXIC," the last of which is detailed elsewhere as a three-year Dutch Melrose collaboration co-produced with Pinkslip and Grant Sayler.
The credit that isn't there
What makes Elation's footprint unusual is what surrounds those twenty-plus credits: almost nothing else. Outside the Christian Gates catalog, his only verified placements are a featured credit on Ajax's "I Love You" and a three-way collaboration on "Fade Away." Notably absent from his resume is "NUMB," Christian Gates's biggest streaming hit, RIAA Gold and built from a Valentine's Day voice note, which is credited instead to Grant Sayler and writer Jonathan Bach. Elation's career is not a session player's diversified résumé. It is a single, deep vein running through one artist's arc, from an unsigned 2019 SoundCloud era through a ONErpm signing to the 2024 debut album.
Cohesion as a job description
By the time that debut, No Strings Attached, arrived in November 2024, Elation's role had shifted from anonymous beat supplier to something closer to creative director. Christian Gates told Hashtag Magazine that after writing "Freak," the track set the direction for the whole record: "Elation and I started using similar samples and effects across the project to create a more cohesive sound... That was a tough job, but we made it happen." It is a modest way to describe holding together a record that moves between alt-pop, pop-punk-leaned rock and trap-adjacent hip-hop, genres Elation's own EDM-rooted, guitar-loop-first workflow was never built for and adapted to anyway.
No PRO, no manager, no name
There is no publisher, no PRO affiliation, no management company on record for Elation, only Elation Sounds, a direct-to-producer sample pack storefront selling acapellas and vocal chops to other bedroom producers, the same audience his old tutorial channel once served for free. He remains, as of 2026-07, a producer whose entire public identity is built from other people's credit sheets and his own screen-recorded narration, a ghost who taught the internet how to build hits and then quietly built one.