Hawkins ought to know something about the real world. The longtime DJ and producer has also interviewed countless groundbreaking DJs as a writer for Mix magazine and written two books, Studio-in-a-Box, and The Complete Guide to Remixing: Producing Professional Dance-Floor Hits on Your Home Computer.

Now, he consolidates all of his expertise into a 12-week online course that offers students a step-by-step introduction to song production. The goal is to make sure that his students gain a nuts and bolts understanding of how music is written and recorded. “If you go into a larger recording studio, you’ll have the idea that the synthesizer modules or sampler modules need to be plugged into the mixing board, and that the mixing board is where you set levels, and that if you want to do a stutter edit, you are probably going to want to grab a sampler to do that,” says Hawkins. “And these are all things that we’re learning within this one piece of software, so it’s pretty darn amazing.”