Interviewer: Nourhan Badr El-Din
Translator: Ziad Tamer
“The artist is not necessarily in love with what he/she is playing. Sometimes it’s exhausting like those training to play a certain instrument. I wish there is a higher level of respect to the artist because he/she is able to change, teach, educate and address the soul and our existence, and we could use it to teach people great stuff…”
Yassin Mahgoub
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Yassin started his career as a singer, composer, musician and guitarist at a young age, struggled and believed in his dream until he succeeded in achieving it, to establish with a group of friends the “Qarar Ezala” band, which is today one of the most famous bands that offer rock music with a mix of oriental melodies in Alexandria and Egypt.
In 2017, he founded Medad band that works on the classic Arabic music and Sufi poetry.
THE INTERVIEW
HR Revolution Middle East: Besides your distinctive career as a Singer, you started poetry recital and joined a voice over program, can you tell us how did you find yourself in this career?
Yassin Mahgoub: I started poetry recital in grade 5 then I joined the theater and I received many awards in poetry recital and acting like the first place prize on Alexandria then on Egypt. After that, I started singing in some shows.
Each voice has its own nature; for example when I participate in an audio drama- a radio show- I act using my voice to convey the feelings and the state of the character giving the audience a space to imagine what the poet is trying to say. Songs are made of rhythms and tones beside the genes and the nature of my singing.
HR Revolution Middle East: How did teaching and singing inspire you and what is the difference between mentoring children and grownups?
Yassin Mahgoub: My dad was a professor and loved teaching; it is like I have knowledge that I want to pass on to others and I enjoy doing that as I learn also from them while brainstorming which unleashes new ideas. This truly makes me happy while having the responsibility of continuous learning and development.
Although I know that I might not be able to be the perfect teacher representing virtue, I do hope I can teach my students everything I have truthfully while being both the teacher and the student. As humans we gain more self-confidence when we do something good for someone, so doing this and seeing them improving gives me energy and happiness.
Because of my teaching career, I was able to improve my singing ability as I was able to understand the concept of singing more and more.
Children in kindergarten and playschool are more affected by interactive learning and anything that involves games and sounds that they can recognize. This environment makes them learn faster, be more attentive and involved and get more responsive. The grownups learn almost the same way, yet it’s harder and it sometimes makes me feel pity for them because everyone of us has a child inside him/her that needs to be brought out which makes me need to find new ways and develop them; furthermore, the ways we use with the grownups must be more technical and so that it is more complicated.
HR Revolution Middle East: You have participated in many projects and workshops in the Jesuit Cultural Center, in addition to performing with your band there. How did the Jesuit Cultural Center affect your personality?
Yassin Mahgoub: The Jesuit is one of the closest places to my heart as I consider it as my second home. The Jesuit’s main message is to accept all differences in people regardless of how one may feel about it. After my experience in Jesuit, I decided to accept everything even if I don’t like it.
HR Revolution Middle East: How did you benefit from the Leadership Program in Jesuit Cultural Center? How do you think you can pass on this experience to people in general?
Yassin Mahgoub: I enrolled in transformational leadership programs I and II. The group included great well-positioned mentors and leaders. The environment was inspiring for us to work as a team to find a state of peace and self-understanding, which helped us to deal gently with our souls and understand others. This enhanced the processing of situations like conflicts and other things which made managing the daily life conflicts peaceful by visualizing those in conflict with me as mentors who see something wrong in me that I should revise.
I always try to get more out of me, search for weak spots, make them stronger and try to manage what I once thought is hard to control like anger because it all starts from within before being projected to people. There was a great quote in the program which was “here and now” which makes me think within a situation to deal with it in the right way.
HR Revolution Middle East: How do you manage your time between your various jobs as sound engineer, distributor, and vocal coach and your artistic projects?
Yassin Mahgoub: I build an organized schedule with special techniques that work for me because I get involved in many things like workshops that I do or want to get involved in and sometimes I have to do many things in the same place since I work as a sound engineer, distributor, composer and a vocal coach sometimes, yet in another place I might want to go to workshops and rehearsals either in Alexandria or Cairo which I make fixed times in my schedule for them. I really would like to advise people to obtain a calendar with them.
HR Revolution Middle East: How can you decide whether an individual has a future as a singer? Is it a natural gift or can any individual obtain it by practicing?
Yassin Mahgoub: I don’t like to judge people’s voices because it’s all about taste, but I might say what I like. I do really like distinctive voices that has its own character and those who don’t have to imitate others and put in all the effort to develop themselves as musicians, composers, distributors or singers to take their music or voices to the next level.
The future is not something in my control; it’s all about the effort and fate even if one wasn’t organized and more of a random person, insisting on putting in the effort needed, and also it might not make a great effect; it might make someone happy or get the meaning behind the words and feel self-worth and get his/her morale back or even represent it.
HR Revolution Middle East: Yassin you always love to live through new experiences, what advise can you give to entrepreneurs or those searching for their passion?
Yassin Mahgoub: The first experiences are nothing to get ashamed of and they should put their eyes on their development and the product they can make. This will take off their shoulders the burden of looking for people’s reviews which will make them able to go in new experiences and take their career to the next level.
Practice is everything in such fields
and as you do more you’ll be more attentive to following instructions and
taking in the negative reviews, because sometimes someone who doesn’t know
anything technical in the industry might have spotted something that you didn’t
do properly, after a year you’ll be in a totally different place.
Many times I have started projects but then deleted them because I felt
the shame of showing this to people and I will continue to do so; I know in my
heart that this will improve my production and it all involves patience and
waiting for the result to get better while I put in more effort and exceed
myself.
Some people can’t do more because they think that they’ve reached the highest level of the game, but we all know that there is no ceiling to what we can do and create. It’s important to know how to be patient, because sometimes the effect won’t appear right away. Van Gogh for example became well-known years after his death.
HR Revolution Middle East: What does the “voice” represent to you and how can each person has his/her own voice print?
Yassin Mahgoub: My voice is a major part of my life because it’s how I express myself and vent out my emotions. Everything in this life has its own voice even the silence has its distinctive voice. Thinking of the fact that I might have been deaf makes me think that I would’ve had a totally different perspective of everything making me sometimes imagine a picture with no sound at all; all senses are important of course. The sound is my life since it can affect me and I can affect it and it can change my mood from crying to having a headache to getting calm and sleepy. God created us all each with a different voice print and I believe that each one of us has the ability to improve something in himself/herself and create something with it without having to imitate others.
Although imitation might teach us something, we don’t need to be another typical image of others being reproduced within us because that’s how we almost learned everything.
HR Revolution Middle East: What false doctrine about voice, identity and art do you think people should stop believing in and what could unite people?
Yassin Mahgoub: I wish people could stop classifying the voices as bad and good because I believe that as long as you can talk you can sing.
Words are rhythms and tones like singing and music. The identity from my perspective is that all people are free and should accept what others believe and themselves and I’m working on this doctrine to understand myself better. We all have our identity and fingerprint that we should bring to light and believe that it exists. Something else I don’t think people should believe is that art is something complementary because it takes an effort to create it and as I believe it is a scientific field since it is related to physics and chemistry. All these instruments and devices were built using science in a specific way. Art is in everything we do including the food we cook. The artist is not necessarily in love with what he/she is playing. Sometimes it’s exhausting like those training to play a certain instrument. I wish there is a higher level of respect to the artist because he/she is able to change, teach, educate and address the soul and our existence, and we could use it to teach people great stuff.
THANK YOU
