Hi Andrew, Thanks for the reply. I know about most of the packages ( dont know Frinika, hmmm or Om ). I was hoping for a tutorial teaching me a bit about music and also a bit about using some of the software to create what had been taught in the tutorial. I don't want to become a musician, but I want to learn enough for my friend to get started. You never know, after playing around with the software I might want to become a musician, and start studying more, but right now my main aim is to teach him so that he can continue on his own. William On Tuesday 25 July 2006 16:52, William Kinghorn wrote: The thing about producing music on Linux (indeed, on any platform) is there is lots of choice/different ways to go about doing things, just have a look at the catalog of tools here: http://linux-sound.org/ An appropriately configured kernel with realtime pre-emption can improve audio performance but is not entirely necessary. How you can go about getting one depends on your distro, some generic info here: http://tapas.affenbande.org/?page_id=6 A nice simple all-in-one sort of package is LMMS, http://lmms.sourceforge.net/ <- check a copy out of CVS and give it a try; although it has come a long way in a short while both in terms of features and stability it's still not entirely finished/stable... ;) Other all-in-one environments are BEAST, Frinika, hmmm, what else? Rosegarden is a relatively mature/stable MIDI sequencer with support for DSSI/LADSPA (and VST via a DSSI container/wine). There are plenty modular synths for Linux, of which Om is a good choice... Hydrogen is a nice simple/mature drum machine .... Bottom line is there is a lot of stuff which you might find useful, so you're best off trying as much of it as possible, so you can at least find what works best for you... :)