Well, I didn't make the program (ModPlug Tracker), and I don't have much free time to explain now, but basically, you go to Instruments, choose to open (import) an instrument, choose a sound file on your comp. In Samples view, you can see the sample for that instrument. You can assign multiple samples to a single instrument too, e.g. plays different samples in different ranges of notes, but... that's more complex and to be honest I've never even used that feature.

Go to Patterns view - this is the grid of actual notes in the song. Click on the first 3 dashes of a line in the grid. Press a key on your keyboard from Q to ], A to ', or Z to / (horizontally), and see the text on the grid change. Those keyboard keys represent keys on a piano. Press 0 to 9 to change the octave.

Press RIGHT to move to the next 2 dashes. Type 01 - this means it will use instrument 01 to play this note. You can also double-click and choose in a more easy-to-see-what-you're-doing way.

Press RIGHT and double-click on the newly-selected 2 dashes. This is where you can perform a basic effect such as set volume, applying to the channel (column) which this note's in.

Press RIGHT to move to get the next single dash selected. Double-click on it and you can choose from a much bigger list of effects. To the RIGHT one more (the last 2 dashes are selected) represents the value of this effect. So if the effect is 'Set panning', if the value is 0 then it sets panning to the center (lower than 0 to the left, larger than 0 to the right). Note that this number is in HEXADECIMAL (i.e. it has A to F after 0 to 9).

You load the sounds into the program, and place notes on different channels (only 1 note can be playing on 1 channel at a time). It plays back the sounds at different speeds for different notes.

It doesn't matter at all which channels you place the notes on. Each note you put down you can specify which instrument it will use, so it's not like each channel is restricted to using only one instrument. The different channels are just to allow multiple notes to play at once. Also you can set the volume and panning of each channel, so you could choose to put all things which should be quiet on some channels which have their volumes turned down low, rather than changing the volume for each note.

Fiddle around with the settings on the General tab to customise some more things too. This is by no means all that is possible with ModPlug Tracker. Just play around and have some fun. =)

You might want to look around for some tutorials on it too (just give it a Google search). ;)

Hope it helps you get started! =)
Post any creations on YouTube, I'd love to see them! =D

- Robbi-985 aka SomethingUnreal