This workshop will describe a concrete step-by-step procedure for proposing and conducting research for beginning researchers in music. Many student researchers find the challenges of doing research overwhelming, so by using a step-by-step approach, students can more successfully learn to conduct research. The most important task for novice researchers is to select a research topic. The workshop will begin by describing three vital elements for any research project topic: 1. It must INTEREST you. 2, It must be WORTHY (justifiable), and 3. It must be MANAGEABLE. We will outline how literature is used to develop the three chapters of the proposal. Once the topic has been selected, I will describe a 12-step procedure that I use with my research students from developing their topic into a research proposal to completing their research project and sharing their research with others. The steps include: 1. Starting the project (selecting a research area, gathering sources, and refining a topic); 2. Creating a purpose, and related research questions; 3. Developing preliminary problem statement chapter starting with purpose/research questions and creating the introduction and need for the study argument; 4. Developing a preliminary method, using the research questions to determine data sources to inform questions, as well as plans to analyze data collected in order to answer the stated research questions. 5. drafting a literature review to tell the story of the existing scholarship and how it relates to the research questions, 6. Making the final versions of the proposal chapters, using the reviewed literature for chapter 1 justification arguments, for informing the reader about the present state of the scholarship in chapter 2, and for justifying method decisions in chapter 3. 7. Defending the proposal with the research supervision committee, including pointers for making the presentation and using the committee expertise to refine your study, 8. After the proposal, making revisions based on committee feedback, and obtaining human subject approval; 9, Proceeding with the project, including data collection, data analysis, and results presentation, and 10. combining results with previous scholarship (from chapter 2) to create your discussion and contextualize your results. 11. After defending your completed project, you next step is to 12. Share your research with Research Articles, Posters, presentations, and additional research as part of a multi-student research program. The focus in this presentation will be on the initial creation of the research proposal.