Article: In the beginning, worry less about finally getting your dubstep opus recorded, the one that you've had bumping around your mind for years. Instead, throw your efforts into playing around with the software and getting familiar with its particularities. Mess around and make joke tracks, record extreme or weird kinds of sounds you wouldn't normally want to listen to. Time spent learning the software will help you down the road when you want to translate something you hear in your head onto the computer. It's an instrument, so learn to play it. Whatever software package you choose to download and install, take the tour of the software or check out guide videos on YouTube to learn everything you can about it. Hook up with experienced dubstep producers who are willing to show you the ropes and teach you about the software and how to use it. Samples can be found with a quick Internet search, your own field recording sessions, or you can spend money and invest in a few sample libraries for a wealth of high-quality sounds to play with. Organize them into categories you'll be able to remember and start making music with song fragments that catch your ear.  Consider getting an external hard drive on which to keep your samples. Organize them into practical categories like "acoustic drums" "spoken word" and "synth sounds" or by textural descriptions to keep things interesting. Maybe label your categories "spacey" or "gnarly" to start combining interesting textures with your samples when you make music. Go old school and start crate-digging for used vinyl and convert your analog samples to digital. Seek out old songs that you've always loved and sample the hook from them. Typically, you'll set the tempo when you start a new track and the software will manipulate any preset beats or other effects to match the intended tempo of the song you're working on. If you're working with your own samples, though, this won't work, so it helps to get familiar with the way creating a beat works.  Beat tracks are made by organizing some combination of kick, snare, and hi-hat sounds into a base rhythm from which you'll build. Choose a kick sample and boost the bass and punch, or layer 3 different kick samples together to get that distinctive Dubstep kick sound. Dubstep tempos generally hover around 140 bpm. You don't have to stick to that, but dubstep songs don't generally fall below 120 or 130. One of the most distinctive elements of dubstep music is the iconic wobbly bass tone, which is typically recorded using a MIDI keyboard or synth and composing a simple bassline yourself. Many free synths can be found online, or you can invest in a professional synth package like Native Instrument's Massive or Rob Papen's Albino 3. Wobbles usually take a little tweaking and synth understanding to get right, but most synths come with pre-made "patches" which you can browse though and choose from. When you get more experienced, start double-tracking each wobble and adding other delays, distortions, and effects to create a collage tapestry that is a piece of electronic music.  Double track your wobbles into the top end and the clean subs at the bottom. When you start distorting and running the top end through a whole bunch of effects to dirty it up, it muds up the bottom end if it's not separated. Take your bass patch, copy the entire track with the synth on it, and then on the copy, use only one oscillator and change it to a sine wave. Then high pass the top end using an equalizer (at around 70 Hz) and low pass the sub (at around 78 Hz). Get some variations in your bass sounds by bouncing your samples to audio, tweaking the synth a little bit, and bouncing it back. Do it a few times, and you've got a library of bass wobbles that all follow the same bassline. You can further expand on this idea by running them all through different effects chains.
What is a summary of what this article is about?
Play around. Build a library of samples. Practice building drum beats. Practice your wobble. Start adding effects and layers.