Khaled Hamdy is a self-confessed sound geek, an electronics engineer by trade, who turned his back on the lucrative corporate world of telecoms to shape his life through his passion – music.
While a career in music, to most, means performance in front of audiences, to Mr Hamdy and his engineer’s brain, it is a mathematical creation that evolves in his purpose-built recording studio in The Greens in Dubai.
His business card says “audio engineer”, but Mr Hamdy creates a symphony of sounds both musical, atmospheric and ambient that produce the sonic texture to video. Mr Hamdy writes music that enhances pictures – TV commercials, video, photographs – and he also fixes a lot of other people’s mistakes. His dream is to be a sound supervisor for Hollywood movies.
His studio allows him the choice of 1,364 instruments accessed through three separate computers alongside a host of actual guitars, violins, mandolins and ouds that are liberally spread throughout. His studio is a mash-up of the bridge on the Starship Enterprise and, what I presume, Keith Richards' house looks like – but possibly not as big.
The room is dominated by five state-of-the-art speakers, a keyboard and at least six screens representing different instruments, timelines, vibrato and sustain with a multitude of other applications, all created and harnessed with his electronics engineering background.
The 34-year-old Egyptian national has lived in the UAE for 10 years and though his career flourished, he felt increasingly disconnected with the work he was doing.
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“My colleagues used to say I only smiled in a crisis, because I could focus my attention solely on a problem,” says Mr Hamdy.
“I had a deal with myself that by the age of 30 I would set up my own business. I was 31 in 2013, when I started this – I just didn’t want to be an employee in the corporate world any more. I got divorced and it helped a lot – it removed the fear.
“I understood life can dramatically change from what you thought its path was. My new girlfriend – now wife, Amina – said I should do it and she would support me, and I haven’t regretted it once. Neither has she, I hope.”
Mr Hamdy's heroes are composers John Williams (Star Wars, Jaws) and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight Rises, Inception) two of Hollywood's heavyweights when it comes to scoring a film.
"John Williams' music is so powerful that people are scared when they swim in a swimming pool – in case a shark may eat them, in a swimming pool," he says. "All because those two notes 'Dum Dum' – the music that introduced the shark in Jaws – play in your mind. Pictures deliver a story, but sound delivers emotion. I can make you laugh, cry or fall in love in the simplest way possible. That is the power that is unleashed when the creative vision for the sound and pictures is in sync."
Mr Hamdy faced the question that all new businesses have to ask: who will be and where will I find clients? Why would anyone come to someone who has no professional musical background and no recordable history of scoring or creating music?
“I had worked on friend’s projects but nothing that had been paid for,” he says. “I thoroughly research everything I do, so I worked out how sound businesses were successful. There were already six companies in the UAE that worked in this space, which may not sound a lot but it is a limited field, and they had a head start on me.
“I decided to work on a freelance trade licence – the outlay on the equipment was eye-watering, but in sound you can hear the quality and this is the best. I collaborated with a friend on a camera review – created my website khaledhamdy.net– ever since then I have worked on referral.”
For an Egyptian, with his country’s rich history in cinema and film making, using the UAE as a starting point for a career in film may not seem to be the natural move.
The UAE has been the base for a few movies but the industry is still, very much, in its infancy. However, Mr Hamdy saw the lack of obvious competition in Cairo and the clean slate that the UAE had to offer as a springboard. “Too many people in Egypt would have stopped me leaving a well-paid, very well-respected job to follow my dreams,” he says.
“The UAE allows you to be who you want to be if you have the passion, the drive and the belief. My clients don’t know I am only relatively new to the business, they only care that I deliver exactly what they asked for, which I do, and frequently more.”
Mr Hamdy’s biggest challenge is nothing to do with sound or the size of a project, but instead scale and marketing.
He has a natural reticence to networking and pushing his company forwards.
“I cannot walk over to people and just tell them what I do,” he says. “That’s not me, I haven’t contacted any advertising agencies or video producers, my business has so far been organic growth. My business is sound, but business is about management and marketing and accounting, so I need growth.”
Mr Hamdy’s next step to Hollywood, where he intends to be in the next five years, is to set up The Workshop at the beginning of 2017, which will be a collaborative workspace. He hopes it becomes a viable business and a creative proving ground for the young and talented.
ascott@thenational.ae
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