Java AES and using my own Key

You should use a KeyGenerator to generate the Key,

AES key lengths are 128, 192, and 256 bit depending on the cipher you want to use.

Take a look at the tutorial here

Here is the code for Password Based Encryption, this has the password being entered through System.in you can change that to use a stored password if you want.

        PBEKeySpec pbeKeySpec;
        PBEParameterSpec pbeParamSpec;
        SecretKeyFactory keyFac;

        // Salt
        byte[] salt = {
            (byte)0xc7, (byte)0x73, (byte)0x21, (byte)0x8c,
            (byte)0x7e, (byte)0xc8, (byte)0xee, (byte)0x99
        };

        // Iteration count
        int count = 20;

        // Create PBE parameter set
        pbeParamSpec = new PBEParameterSpec(salt, count);

        // Prompt user for encryption password.
        // Collect user password as char array (using the
        // "readPassword" method from above), and convert
        // it into a SecretKey object, using a PBE key
        // factory.
        System.out.print("Enter encryption password:  ");
        System.out.flush();
        pbeKeySpec = new PBEKeySpec(readPassword(System.in));
        keyFac = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBEWithMD5AndDES");
        SecretKey pbeKey = keyFac.generateSecret(pbeKeySpec);

        // Create PBE Cipher
        Cipher pbeCipher = Cipher.getInstance("PBEWithMD5AndDES");

        // Initialize PBE Cipher with key and parameters
        pbeCipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, pbeKey, pbeParamSpec);

        // Our cleartext
        byte[] cleartext = "This is another example".getBytes();

        // Encrypt the cleartext
        byte[] ciphertext = pbeCipher.doFinal(cleartext);

Edit:

As written in the comments the old code is not "best practice". You should use a keygeneration algorithm like PBKDF2 with a high iteration count. You also should use at least partly a non static (meaning for each "identity" exclusive) salt. If possible randomly generated and stored together with the ciphertext.

    SecureRandom sr = SecureRandom.getInstanceStrong();
    byte[] salt = new byte[16];
    sr.nextBytes(salt);

    PBEKeySpec spec = new PBEKeySpec(password.toCharArray(), salt, 1000, 128 * 8);
    SecretKey key = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance("PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1").generateSecret(spec);
    Cipher aes = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
    aes.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);

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Old Answer

You should use SHA-1 to generate a hash from your key and trim the result to 128 bit (16 bytes).

Additionally don't generate byte arrays from Strings through getBytes() it uses the platform default Charset. So the password "blaöä" results in different byte array on different platforms.

byte[] key = (SALT2 + username + password).getBytes("UTF-8");
MessageDigest sha = MessageDigest.getInstance("SHA-1");
key = sha.digest(key);
key = Arrays.copyOf(key, 16); // use only first 128 bit

SecretKeySpec secretKeySpec = new SecretKeySpec(key, "AES");

Edit: If you need 256 bit as key sizes you need to download the "Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files" Oracle download link, use SHA-256 as hash and remove the Arrays.copyOf line. "ECB" is the default Cipher Mode and "PKCS5Padding" the default padding. You could use different Cipher Modes and Padding Modes through the Cipher.getInstance string using following format: "Cipher/Mode/Padding"

For AES using CTS and PKCS5Padding the string is: "AES/CTS/PKCS5Padding"