Okay I am sorry for all the confusion, I was finding this really hard to understand. It's like for a year I've imagined я and а as something different so reading all this didnt sink in until I found the perfect example;

Семья (File:Ru-семья.ogg - Wiktionary)
and Себя (File:Ru-себя.ogg - Wiktionary)

so the IPA for Семья is /sʲɪˈmʲjæ/ (С'ИМ'Я)
whereas Себя is /sʲɪˈbʲæ/ (С'ИБ'А)

if you look at the IPA or listen for себя (which probably isn't a surprise to you lot) there is no YA sound present, which is what I was led to believe from many Learn Russian websites. So basically my world has been flipped upsidedown. and I literally cannot pronounce Себя... the realisation that soft consonants arent simply made by putting a Y sound infront of the following vowel is also a massive shock to the system. I also find it literally impossible to make a sound of a Russian letter on its own and can only really pronounce the NAME of Russian letters such as Бэ Вэ Гэ Дэ rather than just the individual sound. So I mean I guess to start from ground zero, are their any links to websites which literally go through all the hard/soft sounds with audio so I can start again fresh. And just to clarify then, unless a VOWEL is at the start or follows a soft sign, it is pronounced exactly (or more similarly) to the non softening vowel and it is only the previous consonant which gives it this effect?