In pictures: Sharam Jey's plush studio

With his 1997 remix of Energy 52’s Café del Mar once voted the greatest dance track of all time, you can be pretty confident that Cologne-based Sharam Jey knows his way around his studio. He’s also remixed for the likes of Moby, Mylo and Faithless, and founded his own label, King Kong Records, in 2001. There were plenty of reasons, then, for Future Music to pay him a visit…

Sharam has several stands’ worth of keyboards, with the Roland Juno-60 [top right] being a workhorse that’s been used on every one of his tracks for “the last ten years”. The MKS-80 Super Jupiter [a refined Jupiter-8, bottom right] is another favourite, and isn’t the only Roland synth in Sharam’s studio…

These two were picked up second-hand from “a guy who retired from music and told me that he was selling some old gear. When I went to see him, I couldn’t believe what he had and I bought the OSCar [pictured on previous slide] the Moog Realistic MG-1 [top], Roland SH-101 [bottom] and Roland TR-909 [not pictured].”

Mission control for Sharam is this Mackie console. “Of course, you don’t need a big desk nowadays,” he concedes, “but I’ve done music for so long and it’s always been about having a big mixing desk. I think you hear the difference when you mix on a real board. I can hear and feel a much fuller mid and low end using a console, plus it’s a much more hands-on experience.”

“I have so many demos and ideas that used this kit over the last ten years that I keep it and often dig out the sounds from the Akai’s [samplers] and so on,” says Sharam. “But really, over the last two years most of this stuff has rarely been used.”

Like so many pros, Sharam has a Mac running Logic, but what are his other software favourites? “I’ve just discovered the plug-ins from TAL [Togu Audio Line]. They feature quite a lot of great instruments that are based on old Roland synths and sound quite a lot like the original models. I’m also using Sylenth1 from Lennar Digital.

“What I was finding really difficult to get were good and broad-sounding reverb plug-ins. But recently I found the Toraverb from D16 Group and I’m really happy that I managed to find it after searching for something similar for so long.”

An overview shot of Sharam’s studio shows that he monitors with a pair of TannoyReveal 5s. “These are very old school, and they’re always the first thing people go on about when they see my studio. I’ve used them for so long and I know them so well. I used to use them in conjunction with [Yamaha] NS10s, which I loved, but when my NS10s broke, I really had to learn the Tannoys to be able to continue mixing.”