The Flux Liner proudly presents: "Music Against Airports" (which has the potential to be a new musical genre, too! But for now the genre is called "grindbient" - for no reason at all.).

So you managed to read part one of this tutorial and now are in serious need of VST Plugins? Don't panic! Just download the unreasonably huge (94.57 MB!) collection of free VST-plugins I managed to upload to Mediafire:

http://www.mediafire.com/?nyll9xtluow

(When "Click here to start download" shows up, click on it. The download should start immediately!)

Option 2: Download the basic version which is smaller because it contains less plugins. Note that you don't need it if you've already downloaded the inconcievably huge version above. Now here is the link to the basic version (32.3 MB):

http://www.mediafire.com/?iqvb1jyjwzo

After you downloaded one of them, just unzip it and copy the folder (with all the subfolders in it) as-it-is in the vst plugin directory (It should be located in the main Psycle-folder. Psycle automatically creates it during the installation process.).

Don't forget to let Psycle check for new plugins everytime you've put a new one into the vst folder. That is important because, after all, the VST plugins do not work as standalones but they need to be recognized by the host-program in order to function.

To do this, just double-click somewhere on the blue background and then on "Check for new plugins" (you can see this button in the the tutorial-videos, too)

By the way, I've found a video on youtube explaining how to "psycle" (for beginners). Too bad the uploader didn't made part 2 as he promised:

Due to popular demand I have decided to make a fairly detailed tutorial-type post about VST's, free music making/editing software and how to use both to your advantage. I wanted to do this for ages and now I finally found the time.

(Note that english is not my first language so please bear with me if my posts contain grammatical errors. [but then again, if you look at the messageboards and forums all over the world, Youtube comments or even a site like Yahoo Answers, it seems that most of the spelling and grammar mistakes are being made by teen-age (?) native english speakers and most of them are from the U.S. ...so maybe I worry too much.])

I made two videos for this post. The first one you can download here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?1sxtxii2zwg

and the 2nd one here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?axwwbxihg6t

(Note how I select presets in the plugins. Normally, almost every plugin comes with some presets.

If you have problems watching the two videos with the players you have on your pc, just download and install the "swiss-knife" of media players, the infamous VLC player:
http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.6h/win32/vlc-0.8.6h-win32.exe

Making music with your computer is actually very easy once you understand a few basic concepts. One of those concepts is that there are thousands of VST plugins. Most of them are commercial, but hundreds of them are free.

There are two kinds of plugins: Instruments and effects.

If want more detailed info about VSTs, please read the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Studio_Technology

Another important thing to know is that you need a host into which you can load these plugins. The VST-host I use is called Psycle. The original developer Arguru passed away in a car accident on 3 June 2007, but the developing continues since the source code is open source. The latest Version is 1.85.

You can download the installer here:

http://kent.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/psycle/PsycleInstallerSSE2.exe

There is also version for older processors (before 2001) available:

http://surfnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/psycle/PsycleInstallerSSE.exe

I use Psycle because of it's chaining capabilities and, of course, because it is free. You can find a basic introduction to the program here:

http://psycle.wikia.com/wiki/Psycle

You can enter notes in psycle using your pc keyboard alone, but if you have a MIDI-compatible keyboard (or something similiar) look here:

http://psycle.pastnotecut.org/download/files/docs/psyclemidi.html

If you use your PC Keyboard to enter notes, you can go the lower octave with / (the ones in your numeric keyboard) and with * you can go one octave up. I took me ages till I figured that one out...

If you want to know how exactly the keyboard is mapped (which key is which note) then just open the psycle help and search for "keyboard commands". If you scroll down to the end of the page, you will find the image which explains the note layout.

The best tutorial for getting started with Psycle I could find on the net is this:

http://psycle.wikia.com/wiki/Quick_Tutorial

In this tutorial the usage of the internal tracker is explained. But you don't need to use the tracker in order to make music if you don't like trackers. Just jam along with your PC Keyboard and record the music with a program like Audacity. Audacity is a free music editing tool and in my opinion even better than a commercial program like Wavelab (at least in some aspects).

You can download Audacity here:

http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/audacity/audacity-win-1.2.6.exe

To record what happens on your pc, you need to set your soundcard as the recording input in the preferences menu of Audacity. You can locate the preferences dialog box by going to Edit -> Preferences, or the shortcut key combination Control P. You should now see the tab "Audio I/O". My output is the microsoft soundmapper and my recording input is called "stereo mix" - which is my soundcard under another name.

And then, still in the "audio I/O"-tab you can choose how many channels audacity should record, each time you hit the red recording button. You want to change this to 2 channels, because, after all, mono sucks.

Basically, I just use Audacity and Psycle to make music. Both are free, both are loaded with cool features.

If you want to work more efficiently with audacity, just take a look at some of the keyboard shortcuts:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/manual-1.2/keyboard_shortcuts.html

The most important ones are cut, copy, paste, select all and silcence. Also of great usefulness is the timeshift tool. From the official manual: "This tool allows you to change the relative positioning of tracks relative to one another in time. To use this tool, simply click in a track and drag it to the left or right. To align two tracks together or reset their time shift back to zero, use the Align Tracks Together or Align with Zero commands."

But these are just a few things you can do with audacity. In the project-menu is a function with which you can add a new mono or stereo-track. This enables you to have multiple tracks. Also everytime you press the "record"-button, a new track will be generated.

If you think your track is finished go to the file-menu and select "export as wav". All tracks will then be mixed down to one. Of course you can export your song to mp3, too - but in order to do that you need to have the LAME codec installed. You can download it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?bc2ltgnddkn

(you need to unzip it first)

The first time you try to export an MP3 file, Audacity will ask you to locate your MP3 encoder (which is the little file called lame_enc.dll). From then on, Audacity will not need to ask you again.