Interview e - James Tubbritt aka Sharp
James Tubbritt known as Sharp to the Korg user community, together with Daz owns http://www.korgforums.com/.
A very helpful platform for OASYANs and those on the way to become one.
blogasys: Sharp, please be so kind and tell us a little bit about yourself.
Sharp: I’m 31 years old, Irish and married to a beautiful girl called Christine. I’m also a proud Dad to two little angels aged 7 months and 4 years, (Lana & Faye). I live just outside Waterford City here in Ireland, also known as the sunny south east which is kind of funny really since it rains here all the time. My hobbies are music (obviously), photography, 3D Art, and I love a good movie. I went to School here in Waterford at Mount Sion Christian bothers. I’m a qualified Sheet Metal engineer, with C&C Programming, Radian & CAD. Which I’ve used in places like the Aerospace Industry where I made Jet Engines and also worked as a Lab Technician. So if you ever need your car pimped, I can slap a Jet Engine on the back :-).
Now days I’m living sort of a double life I guess due to the fact that I found it difficult to keep IA-Studio open in the day and support a family. So for the moment I decided to hold off on the full time studio work until I build up a bigger client base. So I run IA-Studio recording bands at night, while also sequecning music for clients, and designing sounds. Also not forgetting KORG Forums as I obviously spend a lot of time online. During the day, I’m a Quality Manager in a soft drinks company where I manage the quality control department. It’s an interesting job as I get to do a lot of data base design, and I also get to use my programming to automate a lot of processes as well as deal with my Staff and keep them busy.
blogasys: How did you start making music and have you been muscilly educated?
Sharp: It’s actually kind of strange really because I clearly remember the day I got started. I was 4 years old and in my first year of school. It was sports day and the team I was on won the tug-of-war game. The prize was a plastic whistle full of chewing gum. Certainly not something you would give a 4 year old now days, but back then it wasn’t a bad thing. Anyway, after eating all the gum, I realised that I could play anything I wanted to on the whistle. Didn’t have to try, I could just do it. So that’s how I got started. My Parents where kind of freaked out by it because I would play along with the Radio or TV in real-time.
When I reached 7 years old, I guess that’s when my music training started as the school I was in had a brass band. I joined up and they thought me how to read and write music there, as well as play all the different instruments. I started off on Cornet, and over the years worked my way up to Bass Trombone where I stayed on that until I left School.
blogasys: Which musician influenced you most and who are you favourite musicians?
Sharp: I’d say that Enya has influenced me the most by far. She just has such an amazing sound, and her minimal approach to musical perfection is a lesson in itself. There is so much to be learned from her, especially in songs like Storms in Africa and Watermark. Watermark easily being my favourite song by her.
As for who would be my favourite musicians.
Enya, Jarre, and Neil from the Pet Shop Boys. The songs “Left to my own devices” and “I’m not scared” are both an education in music themselves. Extremely complex.
blogasys: What kind of music are you listening these days and why?
Sharp: Madonna, the live confessions tour. Christine purchased the Audio CD/ DVD pack for me and after watching the concert. I just can’t stop listening to the audio CD lately. Come to think of it, that’s all I’ve been listening to for the last 4 weeks. She did a version of “Music” with a 70’s style disco feel to it which was really great.
I also like Modonna as I feel there is a lot you can learn from her bass lines, and chord sequences. The song “Sorry” being a good example.
blogasys: Now lets talk about your music, are there any projects you have been working on?
Sharp: There’s actually quite a lot on at the moment. I currently have 2 original bands booked in, 3 solo singers that I will have to sequence backing tracks for, and I’m working on a musical. Not to mention my own projects. I’m in the final stages of finishing my own CD.
blogasys: what inspired you to make your own CD?
Sharp: What inspired me to start writing music for this CD was a mixture of things. The most important to me was the fact that I had spent so much of my life working on music for someone else, I had little to show of my true self. When working for others, I try create what they describe, so I never really look upon anything I write for clients as “me”.
I also had an idea of “One Song A Month” in mind by where I would get a number of people on KORG Forums to sign up to a year long contract, by where we would all agreed to write a one song a month (find the link at the end of this interview). The idea being, we could give each other the support to actually make it to the end, and give advice as we went through the process.
A year is a long time, and 12 songs for many is an almost uninamaginable tasks. So as a groupe, things where easier, and overall it brought somthing very good to the KORG comunity.
The title track of my CD “Leanbh Mo Chroi” was written for KORG. I was one of the sound designer who worked for KORG on the Triton Extreme, so I used the Prototype Triton Extreme to write this song as a demo tune for KORG. The orignal version can still be found on www.korg.com. The rest of the tracks where basically just inspired by how I felt at the time of writing the tracks. So it’s all me.
Find a link to Sharp’s website “irishacts” at the end of this interview or under “links” “OASYS user websites”. All tracks of his CD “Leanbh Mo Chroi” can be heard and downloaded for free. For now two examples of his work:
Aoibhinn
Leanbh Mo Chroi - Child of my Heart
blogasys: What is your current musical project?
Sharp: Right now I’m running out of time, so I’ve had to focus all my attention on a musical I have been working on. This has been an ongoing project that has started to get very serious now as my client has received full financial backing from a company. I’m afraid I can’t go into all the details, but basically it’s very likely that the act will reach the stage in England, and I will get to hear a full orchestra play what I sequenced. So I’m looking forward to that. I’m also enjoying the fact that I get to use my roots from my background in the Brass band world I grew up with to score sheet music for my client.
blogasys: what kind of equipment are you using and why did you decide for it?
Sharp: It took me a long time to realise this, but less is more. So I’ve spent a lot of time downsizing my studio setup to 100% usable gear. So basically the following items where chosen because each one brings something different to the mix. Each in their own right unique and very flexible.
KORG OASYS 88
KORG Triton Studio fully loaded.
KORG Wavestation SR
AKAI S50000
KORG Pa1Xpro
Yamaha Tyros 2
Yamaha QY700
Yamaha VL70m
Yamaha WX-5
Sequential Circuits Pro One
A real Trumpet and Guitar.
2 Computers.
Tascam SX-1
Yamaha 01V
TC Helicon Voice Prism Plus.
4 Behringer 9024’s
2X Behringer 2032
2X Mackie HD824
4X Celestion 15″ Road Series
2X Celestion SR1
2X Celestion SR3
I have 1 Rode NT2-A Mic, and this is the main Mic that gets the most use. Excellent value for money, but truthfully, that’s not why I bought it. The day I was shopping, I had 1500 Euro in my pocket to lay down on a single Mic. The music store I went to had a fantastic selection too, but no matter what I tried, I found myself comparing everything to the NT2. In the end I just bought it.
Not being one who cares what “name” is on a Mic or anything for that matter. I also bought 2 T.BONE SCT1100 mics, and 4 T.BONE SC600. Dirty cheap, but holy molly do they sound expensive. I was extremly happy with that purchase, and I’m not ashamed to even mention the fact that I like them considering how little they do cost.
I also have 10 SM-58, and 2 EV Mics (can’t remember the model number), for general usage like drums, and so on. Nothing special here, just good old reliable Mics you can hop off a wall and they will work like new. Vocal are processed through the TC-Helicon Voice Prism Plus, and powered by the Pre-Amps in my Tascam SX-1.
blogasys: what was the reason for you to purchase OASYS?
Sharp: I could make a long list of things, but basically I was starting to become very unhappy with my Triton Studio as I was driving every system flat out, and still not getting the results I wanted. I would quickly run out of effects, and since my sounds are based around my own samples. I found myself waiting a lot of the time for the Triton to load sounds.
Where now, the OASYS loads hundreds of MB in seconds, I have 16 HDR tracks and a huge IFX engine. Karma v2 is also seriously impressive. It’s only when you sit down and really dig in do you get a good feel for what can be achieved with your own music.
blogasys: are there any things you would like to see in OASYS in the near future?
Sharp: Probably the most important one for me would be streaming of samples direct form the hard disk, just like Gigastudio, and with full support of Giga file formats. With so many wonderful sample libraries becoming available, and the almost death of AKAI S3000 format. It seems a shame that such a state of the art workstaiton like OASYS does not support any modern day formats.
After that, I’d like to see the Sequencer getting that well overdue makeover. For someone like me who has since the days of the M1 being sequencing on nothing other than KORG sequencers. I work extremely quickly with the on-board sequencer, however, because of this, I’m also left well out of the loop on what software sequencers have to offer. Which is a lot. It would be nice to see some of those advanced features finding their way into OASYS.
blogasys: you are programming sounds which are available online - can you tell us a little bit about forthcoming OASYS sounds?
Sharp: Yeah, I’m deep in development of a new sample library that when finished will be many times the size of anything I’ve previously released before. With so much sample memory now being available compared to a Triton Series workstation, I now have the opportunity to take a title like Vocal Assault much further and greatly expand on the number of human voice sounds, as well as expanding all this into many new area’s where Vocal Assault could not go.
So, while Vocal Assault was primarily a library based around the human voice. This new library will go much further. This is something I’m very excited about. My heart is in the right place too for this project because I’m not worried about the development costs, which so far have been great. I’m doing this to prove to myself at this point that I can. So when completed, this will be “ME” and my best work. I want it to be like this because due to the limited compatibility of KORG’s PCG file format with their other workstation coming out as this could very well be the last large scale project I complete. It just makes more sense to develop sounds on a much smaller scale and sell them individually rather than developing expensive complete libraries.
blogasys: What was the reason for you to start with korgforums.com and are there any things that are exceeding your positive and negative expectations?
Sharp: Ok, this is going to be a long one. An interesting one, and no doubt a trip down memory lane for all of our Advanced members. The people who have been with us from the beginning.
There is a LOT of history here, so lets go back to the very beginning. A time when I didn’t even know Daz, and there was no real on-line home for a KORG community.
Like any good story starts. A long long time ago in a galaxy far away, whoops I mean server, not galaxy, started a low-tech forum called Tritonica where many of the advanced members of the KORG Forums of today first meet and became friends. This little community was popular and eventually as the number grew, so did the need for a proper forum. Two guys got together and setup a place called Triton Central (TC). Which was very successful in it’s day and eventually grew into a large community.
Like all good stories, you have your good and your bad. And in this case there where a few members of the TC forum who would argue with anyone, and pretty much just spend all their time stirring up as much trouble as possible. Eventually this started spill out all over the forum and sadly the quality of the content greatly dropped due to the advanced members being put off actually helping people. Unbelievably, due to what seemed to be forum policy, this was allowed to continue.
I was probably one of the most active members on the forum, and even I started to lose all faith and less inclined in supporting the community.
In the real world, I was getting ready to build a recording studio here in Ireland, and I had a lot of plans, so I setup a website called Irish Acts Recording Studio www.irishacts.com . I used this portal to host a very large download section, and even back in the day, it was the largest KORG related download section there was. This coexisted along side TC, and was at the time never in conflict.
But then, I wanted to get a very basic forum working, if that’s what you would even call it by today’s standards because I was getting annoyed by the argunig on TC, and I had my own ideas on how things should be run. But there where CGI Script problems I couldn’t figure out (not my thing) at the time as so I posted a message into a KORG Yahoo group looking for help.
And a guy called Daz “the one and only, now my partner in crime :-)” replied and offered to help. So, we got talking and hit it off straight away. We had so much in coming it was scary, and so I handed over access to IA (Irish Acts) to him to take a look at the problem. Daz then just blinked (the wizard that he is with this kind of thing) and sorted everything out. And so the first basic forum was operational.
While the download section was a roaring success and doing well, the forum was so basic that Daz made a few suggestions, and eventually installed our first proper forum. YaBB !!.
The timing couldn’t have been better either.
This is technically the start of it all, the big bang, the beginning, the birth of IA’s KORG community. Because of how well Daz and I hit it off, and our idea’s on how things should be run, added to the fact that there was serious unrest over on TC. IA started to grow quickly and get a name as a forum where people could find respect as well as advanced technical support. Because of the respect and the way things where run, the community has always been very close, and at this time of it’s development, it grew at an unbelievable rate as word spread.
Still, it wasn’t plain sailing. Success = demands on resources, and considering the limited resources of a community that is run free from advertisements, and I was just paying the bill for out of my own pocket. It wasn’t too long before IA outgrew it’s home. This was to happen twice more before one of the most threatening incidents would come along that would threaten the existence of our community.
Which was our HOST who pretty much took all the hosting fees, pulled the plug and did a runner with over 1 million USD in fees from all it’s clients.
Not to let something as detrimental as this get us down, we decided to turn this around and make a good thing out of this. The IA community was huge, but for the future development of the forum, we felt that the name IA was preventing it from being all it could. Bearing in mind that IA is my Stuido’s name, and the KORG community was created more out of a need of the people and the way we ran things. We decided that it was now time to make the move an take the KORG community out from the protection of the IA name and give it it’s own name. Sort of bring it all to the next level so to speak. And so we agreed on a name and KORG Forums was born.
As always, Daz is the technical admin. He’s the one that keeps the entire community on-line and deals with all the technical issues, which is an insane amount of work. Popularity of a community brings unwanted attention from spam bots for starters. But someone does have to pay the bills. This is kind of my area since I’ve been the one doing this out of my pocket up untill now, as well as having a backseat and been a public face to IA / KF where Daz does all the real work 
As so because of the new costs, and the size of the comunity, this is where the true spirit of the community comes in. It’s with great pleasure I can say that KF is still advertisement free, and now supported entirely by the members of the forum through a donation button we added for a few weeks upon the launch of the KORG Forums name. A button that only needs to return once every few years, and I’m sure will be supported long into the future as we continue grow as a community.
Was it all worth it ?
Yeah baby. KF has a life of it’s own and will continue to grow no matter what the future holds. Unless the earth is hit by a big asteroid that is
blogasys: thank you very much, Sharp !
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© all fotos by Sharp
irishacts.com
korgforums
One song a month – One year Contract
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