Reply to Producing for beginners

Hope everyone's had a beneficial and positive week so far!

I've recently started spinning, bought my first piece of gear last week and am currently in the process of finishing "How to DJ right, the art and science of playing records" and other materials aimed at beginners for DJing.

However, my main goal is to produce music, as the reason I've started spinning is to hopefully one day reach the festival level. That being said, how essential is learning how to mix when it comes to producing music? From my understanding, producing music is divided into 3 steps;

1) producing the beats
2) mixing the beats/samples into an actual song
3) mastering the final track


I'm interested in producing house/progressive house and progressive trance music, will Ableton provide the necessary mechanics to successfully produce house/trance music? What I mean is, are there any additional software you would recommend that would work with Ableton, such as an external beat maker or synth etc.

Last question, how did most of you start off producing? Did you start messing around with Ableton to figure it all out? Watch tons of youtube videos then start pouring in your creativity onto the track? I feel rather lost in how I should proceed.