Elation

Elation is a Los Angeles based record producer who began uploading dubstep tracks to SoundCloud in 2011, pivoted toward the melodic style now known as Future Bass around 2015, and built a following through an “EDM Remakes” YouTube tutorial channel that taught aspiring producers his FL Studio process for free. Since 2019 he has been the most consistently credited producer on the catalog of Christian Gates, shaping the sound of Christian's earliest SoundCloud-era singles through his 2024 debut album No Strings Attached. He also runs the direct-to-producer sample-pack business Elation Sounds.

Identity and the name problem

“Elation” is a genuinely ambiguous handle in the music business. At least five unrelated entities operate under some version of the name: this Los Angeles producer; a UK-based DJ and ghost-production promotion outfit that has claimed portfolio work with Joel Corry, Sia, David Guetta, Pitbull and Sigma; Elation Entertainment, a New Orleans music company founded by David Lee Adams with a roster including Silkk the Shocker Miller and BlaqNmilD; Maz Lunden's London-based Elation Music/Elation Records/Jaffa Music, active since 2006; and a scattering of songs and a Christian rock band that simply use the word “Elation” as a title, unconnected to any producer. The handle collision is close enough that social accounts have to be checked individually: the correct producer's SoundCloud is elation-sounds, and it explicitly lists itself as affiliated with Christian Gates's own SoundCloud account, while the unrelated UK entity uses the near-identical elation_music and @elationmusicofficial handles.

Genius describes the correct Elation as “an EDM Producer from Los Angeles, California,” noting he started “writing dubstep tracks in late 2011 as a ‘fun project’” before moving toward Future Bass around 2015. That identity is independently corroborated by ONErpm's official Christian Gates signing press release, which states plainly that “Gate$ recorded his first album in 2019 with top EDM producer Elation,” and by a 2024 Hashtag Magazine feature in which Christian Gates himself credits his debut album's cohesive sound to “working with long-time collaborator and producer Elation.” Elation's own 2020 tutorial video, in which he narrates first-person the writing and engineering of a Christian Gates song, is the clearest self-confirmation of the connection. His real name has not surfaced publicly; his listed management contact is a personal email address, “ElationFL@gmail.com,” the “FL” suggesting FL Studio rather than a company or given name.

Come-up: dubstep, tutorials, Future Bass

Elation's bio traces a familiar bedroom-producer arc. He began making dubstep in late 2011 purely as an experiment, and by around 2015 that experimentation had turned toward a more melodic, chord-driven style; that shift coincided with the launch of his “EDM Remakes” YouTube channel, on which he broke down and recreated hits by artists like Martin Garrix, Hardwell, Tiesto and Justin Mylo in FL Studio, frequently releasing the project files for free. Through what Genius describes as “years of dedicated practice,” that experimentation crystallized into the sound that would become known industry-wide as Future Bass. The tutorial-first model, teaching technique publicly while monetizing through sample packs, became his defining career strategy, and it directly produced his connection to Christian Gates.

In a 2020 tutorial titled “How I Made A Song That Got 1,000,000 Streams,” Elation narrates the origin of that partnership in his own words: “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.” He adds that “after most of the song was structured there was still a verse left open and he asked me to feature on the song”, meaning Elation is credited not only as producer but as a featured performer on that record, released as “Fuck You.” The pathway, a producer leasing an anonymous beat that becomes a hit almost by accident, is a common one in SoundCloud-era pop and rap, and ONErpm's artist bio corroborates the timeline from Christian's side: the Elation-produced material predates and directly enabled Christian's first viral TikTok moment in June 2020.

The Christian Gates collaboration

By the time of Christian Gates's 2024 debut album No Strings Attached, Elation had moved from beat supplier to something closer to a creative director on the project. Christian Gates told Hashtag Magazine: “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. The goal was to pull together a collection of songs that, while diverse, still felt like they belonged to the same body of work. That was a tough job, but we made it happen.” That quote frames Elation's role on the album less as a single-genre specialist and more as the collaborator responsible for making a stylistically restless record hang together, work reflected in the No Strings Attached era generally.

Public credit metadata across Genius, Apple Music, Shazam and YouTube shows Elation attached to at least twenty tracks in the Christian Gates catalog spanning 2019 through 2025, including “Skitzo,” “Stayin' Up,” “Trust Me,” “Fuck You,” “I Still Love You,” “Fade Away,” “Dangerous State of Mind,” “Traumatized,” “Arson,” “I Won't Beg for You,” “Never with You Again,” “I Need You,” “FOOD POISONING,” “SHREDS,” “SECRETS,” “TOXIC” (the Dutch Melrose collaboration, also produced with Pinkslip and Grant Sayler, and covered in The Three-Year Story Behind TOXIC), “BABYDOLL,” “FREAK,” “SAYING GOODBYE,” “LIAR LIAR,” “after (h)ours” with VOILÀ, and “BLEED” (2025), plus a 2026-dated YouTube upload of “SOMETHING BETWEEN US.” Notably, Christian Gates's single biggest streaming hit, “NUMB” (RIAA Gold, 90 million-plus streams, told in How a Valentine's Day Voice Note Became a Gold Record and touched on in The Raspy Voice That Built Christian Gates), is not an Elation production; that song is credited to Grant Sayler and writer Jonathan Bach. Among verified Elation productions, “Fuck You” (documented by Elation himself at over a million Spotify streams and 1.1 million TikTok views) and “Lost” (5.3 million-plus Spotify streams, from the same early-catalog era) stand as his most successful confirmed placements.

Elation's discography search across Genius, Apple Music and Viberate is overwhelmingly built around this one relationship. Outside the Christian Gates catalog, the only other verified placement is a featured producer/performer credit on Ajax's “I Love You” (2021), plus a three-way collaboration with Christian Gates and an artist called Devan on “Fade Away.” That narrowness is unusual for a producer with this many credited songs: rather than a session player with a diversified artist roster, Elation's public career runs almost entirely through a single collaborator's arc, from Christian's unsigned 2019 SoundCloud era through his ONErpm signing and 2024 debut album.

Signature sound and toolkit

Elation's technical process is unusually well documented for a producer with no traditional press interviews, because his tutorial catalog functions as a public production diary. He works in FL Studio, and his own breakdowns reference a consistent plugin stack: Xfer Serum and Sylenth1 for leads and basses, Native Instruments Massive for supplementary bass and lead sounds, reFX Nexus for layered guitar and pluck samples (he has described stacking multiple guitar timbres, jazz guitar and muted guitar among them, at different octaves), iZotope Ozone 5 for mastering, NewTone for pitch correction, Spitfish for de-essing, a Waves CLA-2A style compressor on vocal dynamics, and Xfer OTT used subtly for high-end glue. No vintage or hardware gear appears anywhere in his documented process; his stack is entirely software-based, consistent with a self-taught, tutorial-era producer rather than a studio-trained engineer.

His core genre identity is Future Bass and EDM, but his work with Christian Gates spans considerably further, into alt-pop, pop-punk-leaning rock and trap-adjacent hip-hop. He has described building tracks from a guitar-led main loop rather than starting from drums, an unusual melody-first workflow for a producer with EDM roots, and layering hip-hop 808s and claps underneath pop-leaning guitar melodicism within a single beat, a genre-blending instinct that foreshadows the reputation Christian Gates would later build. Elation has also articulated something close to a stated production philosophy. Reflecting on the unfinished mix that became “Fuck You,” he said: “even with an unfinished track a pretty good lesson was learned here, you shouldn't stress over having the highest possible production quality because at the end of the day if people like the way it sounds they're going to listen to it.”

Business: sample packs and self-management

No publisher, PRO affiliation (ASCAP, BMI or SESAC) or management company has surfaced for Elation in any public record. His only listed business contact across SoundCloud, YouTube and his own website is the personal-style email address noted above, suggesting he is self-managed, at least for beat-licensing and sample-pack commerce. His primary independent venture is Elation Sounds, a direct-to-producer sample pack company selling royalty-free acapellas, vocal-chop packs, premium sample packs and production templates through elation-sounds.com, with testimonials from other YouTube producer-creators rather than celebrity co-signs, a business model functionally similar to a Splice or Loopcloud storefront but self-distributed rather than run through a third-party marketplace.

Collaborators and network

Elation's documented professional network is narrow and almost entirely contained within the Christian Gates catalog and a small rotating group of co-producers who appear alongside him on individual tracks. Grant Sayler is the most recurring name, appearing as a co-producer on “Arson,” “I Won't Beg for You,” “Traumatized” and “TOXIC,” suggesting an ongoing rotating producer-team dynamic around Christian Gates rather than Elation working alone. Jason Suwito co-produced “Traumatized” and “LIAR LIAR”; Taha Beats (credited elsewhere as Kurffew) co-produced “FOOD POISONING” and “BABYDOLL”; SameSame co-produced “FREAK”; Joe Reeves co-produced “SAYING GOODBYE”; Peter Fenn co-produced “SHREDS”; and fukkfaith co-produced “BLEED.” DR1PP is a featured collaborator alongside Elation on “Trust Me.” No connections have surfaced between Elation and other producers, songwriters or labels profiled elsewhere in this session, including Dan Nigro, Ian Kirkpatrick, Amy Allen, Thomas LaRosa, MADKID Records or Rebellion Records, reinforcing that his footprint is a deep, narrow one rather than a broad session-producer network.

Timeline

Frequently asked

Is Elation the same person as the UK DJ using a similar name?

No. The UK act operating as “Elation” or “Elation Music” (handles including elation_music and @elationmusicofficial) is a separate dance-music promotion and ghost-production outfit with no documented relationship to Christian Gates or to this producer's catalog. The two share only a name and a general electronic-music orbit.

Did Elation produce “NUMB,” Christian Gates's biggest song?

No. “NUMB” is credited to Grant Sayler as composer and Jonathan Bach as writer; no Elation production credit appears on that track's public metadata.

What is Elation's real name?

It has not been made public. No Genius bio, social account, or public credit lists a legal name; his only surfaced contact is a personal-style email tied to FL Studio.

What is Elation's day-to-day production tool?

FL Studio, referenced consistently across his tutorial catalog and management contact address, paired with a plugin stack built around Xfer Serum, Sylenth1, Native Instruments Massive and reFX Nexus.

Does Elation release music under his own name?

Yes, in a limited way. He has released original tracks including “I Still Love You” (featuring Christian Gates) and “lose my mind” through his own SoundCloud and YouTube channels, though his profile functions primarily as a producer-for-hire and tutorial creator rather than a touring or chart-facing artist.

Selected production credits

Further reading on the collaborators named on this page: Christian Gates's own entry covers his full catalog and career arc; No Strings Attached: Cutting the Strings details the 2024 debut album Elation helped shape; The Three-Year Story Behind TOXIC covers the Dutch Melrose collaboration Elation co-produced; and How a Valentine's Day Voice Note Became a Gold Record covers “NUMB,” the biggest Christian Gates hit that Elation did not produce, credited instead to Grant Sayler.