Seyifunmi Michael has become one of the driving forces behind Afrobeats’ move into orchestral territory, arranging and directing for Adekunle Gold across stages from Lagos to London. In this conversation, he talks through his roots in church music, what actually separates a producer from a music director, and the process behind bringing full orchestras into Afrobeats without losing what made the songs work in the first place.
NoteS: You’ve worn a lot of hats over the years, starting from church, keyboard, and live orchestration. How much of that early foundation still shows up in what you do today?
Seyifunmi Michael: I started in church, and honestly, I come from a family of musically inclined people. My dad plays the guitar, and my mum used to sing; she had two or three gospel albums. My sisters are into choir too, so I basically came into the music family from birth. Even my dad, at my age, used to put bands together for a woman called Bola Are in Ibadan. That’s how it started for me too, playing keyboard in church, being involved in Sunday service arrangements, composing, directing instrumentalists.
I think that’s one of the things that led me to where I am today as a music director, because playing an instrument doesn’t automatically make you a director. As a director, you’re managing people, thinking for each band member, thinking for the artist. As a producer, I used to follow my mum to the studio whenever she recorded, and all those experiences shaped my production instincts along the way.
My parents also got me a music theory teacher at one point, and I wasn’t serious about it at all. He’d put a music sheet in front of me, and I’d ask him to play it first so I could hear it; then I’d just play back what he played instead of reading it. He used to get furious, insisting I wasn’t reading, even though I could play it. Looking back, some people approach music through their eyes, reading the page, and some approach it through their ears and spirit. If you only play from the page, once the book is gone, you can’t perform.
That experience is what pushed me toward theory eventually, though I’m not a theory person at heart. In this era, being strong in theory is a plus, but it doesn’t stop you from being a composer or arranger. Hans Zimmer, for instance, is one of the greatest arrangers and composers in the world, does film scores and everything, and he’ll tell you he doesn’t know much theory. He’s one of my mentors. I know what I carry in my mind and my ear, and these days you can collaborate with a copyist. You compose with your software; it translates to sheet music, and if you have a bit of knowledge, you can edit it yourself or send it off to be transcribed properly.
NoteS: You and Adekunle Gold have been creative partners for decades now, starting from your boy band days to touring the world together. How has that relationship evolved, and what’s kept it intact?
Seyifunmi Michael: It’s all been in stages. From the boy band, we realised Nigeria doesn’t really support bands or duos in a way that makes financial sense, so it became a mutual decision: he’d focus on singing, I’d focus on the music. Being in a band together gave us more than a brotherly relationship; it gave us a musical one. I know what he can sing, and he knows what I can do musically.
It’s a bit like Drake and his producer 40. 40 understands Drake’s range, his persona, what he can and can’t do on stage, because they’ve built that relationship over years, sleeping in the same rooms, touring together, being in studios together. That’s the kind of relationship we have. It’s not just Adekunle Gold I work with; I’ve done music direction for Fireboy, Teni, and a few others, but he’s my primary partner, and we’re taking this all over the world together.
NoteS: You wear a lot of hats: composer, producer, arranger, music director. For someone hearing you for the first time, how would you differentiate these roles, and which do you enjoy most?
Seyifunmi Michael: A music producer creates music for commercial purposes, in the studio. Some producers are just beatmakers, but the real ones are artist developers too. Once the song is done and handed to the marketing team, the producer’s work is essentially finished.
A music director’s job starts where the studio ends: bringing that music to life on stage. You’re translating whatever was done in the studio so that it doesn’t sound alien live, because now you’re dealing with the energy in a room, not just a recording. You have to think about theatrics, whether a three-minute song needs to be shortened or stretched for a performance, what instruments will actually translate the feeling, because you can’t put a rock guitar over a ballad like Adele’s “Hello” and expect it to make sense. You have to think inside the box and outside it, because too far outside and it just sounds chaotic.
I enjoy both, honestly. Music production lets me have a conversation with my inner self, creating something that’s never existed before, even if it’s inspired by other things. It connects me to my soul; if you listen to the songs I’ve produced, there’s a lot of soul in them. Music directing and arranging, I go a little crazy with, because there are fewer rules. I did an arrangement for a show in Sweden once and had to switch the whole style to fit the audience there. Directing is more about enhancing something that already exists, in a beast kind of way.
There’s also a smaller distinction worth mentioning: an arranger doesn’t always go on to direct the music themselves. Cobhams Asuquo, for example, is both an arranger and a music director, one of my mentors, and he arranged Davido’s recent tour and then handed it to Davido’s own team to execute with a different director and band.
NoteS: You’ve recently been bringing orchestra into Afrobeats, which isn’t traditionally an African format. How did that idea take shape?
Seyifunmi Michael: Orchestra isn’t really an African thing on its own; we do ensembles, but not orchestras in that classical sense. What I’m doing is infusing orchestra into Afrobeats. It’s not entirely new; artists like Fela composed with orchestration and strings in mind from the start. The difference with what I do is that the song already exists, and I’m the one bringing the orchestra into it afterwards.
Sometimes I know from the start a song will carry heavy orchestration, like “Sade,” where I already had the strings in mind while we were cooking up the record. Other times, like with “High,” which is a straight party jam, we had to find a way to infuse orchestra into something that wasn’t built for it. That’s a different kind of composing and arranging altogether.
NoteS: Taking a song people already know and love and adding an orchestral arrangement to it seems risky. How do you approach that without losing what made people love the song in the first place?
Seyifunmi Michael: I always have to strike a balance. People already know these songs, and an orchestral arrangement isn’t a sound Nigerian audiences are used to outside places like the MUSON Centre, which most people don’t even realise hosts orchestral shows you can buy tickets to. So whatever I do has to still sound like what people already know and love.
I’ve seen cases where an Afrobeats song gets handed to a composer who doesn’t actually listen to Afrobeats, and they translate it in their own way, disconnected from the source. What I try to do is compose the orchestral parts the Afrobeats way, using the orchestra to make its own statement rather than just decorate the track. If you stripped the original song away and only kept what I wrote for the orchestra, it should still make sense on its own. That’s the balance: staying close enough to the original that it’s still recognisable, while using the orchestra to build an experience around it.
NoteS: Which songs gave you the most trouble to arrange?
Seyifunmi Michael: “High” was tough, just because it’s such a big song. If the band had just played it straight with an ordinary snare, the crowd would still go off simply because it’s “High.” So I had to create pockets within the arrangement, moments that let people know something had shifted without losing the energy that made them love the song in the first place. That was more creative stress than technical difficulty, not weeks of struggle, just careful thinking.
“Sade” didn’t stress me as much, mostly because the song’s roots are already in Western chords, so the orchestral translation came naturally.
The intro I built for another track started with a Mozart piece, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” from around 1787. I remembered playing it as a kid during those music theory lessons I mentioned earlier. I knew the original version of the song had been sung by Yinka Ayefele, and I’d seen him perform it live once on piano, so that’s where the idea came from. Since it was in a different key, I had to rewrite it, and I got help from a professor at Guildhall School of Music to make sure I hadn’t mishandled the original composition. He confirmed I was good to go.
NoteS: You’ve directed shows across North America, Europe, Australia and Africa. Does the job change from market to market?
Seyifunmi Michael: It changes a lot, though not everyone approaches it the way I do. Before I arrange anything, I research the show, the country, sometimes even reaching out to the promoter to understand the vibe on the ground. If you watched the same artist perform the same set in Europe versus North America or Africa, it would sound different, because I tailor it to that audience.
Even within Nigeria, it changes. The arrangement for a naming ceremony is different from what you’d hear at the National Theatre; at a naming ceremony, you want space and tempo that lets the mother of the child dance. I don’t just think about the music, I think about the experience people came for. It’s ultimately a conversation between me and the artist or their manager, even though they trust me enough to run with my instincts most of the time.
NoteS: You’ve had milestone shows at the Royal Festival Hall in London and the National Theatre in Lagos. Which of those nights sits best with you, and how did the experiences compare?
Seyifunmi Michael: London was my first major orchestral concert, so it came with real anxiety. It wasn’t that I was new to the work, but the scale of it was different, and I didn’t know how the audience would receive it. There was a lot of back and forth creatively, and a lot of nervousness about acceptance.
Lagos came about a month after London, and having that experience behind me helped. The main difference was working with Nigerian musicians. I did seven rehearsals with the orchestra here, compared to just one in London, where I sent the sheet music ahead, and everyone prepared largely on their own before a single rehearsal close to the show. Lagos was more of a human resource and management challenge than a creative one; there was no doubt about the music itself, just the work of coordinating people.
NoteS: The National Theatre show was reportedly the first of its kind since the venue’s reintroduction. Did that carry any extra weight for you, culturally?
Seyifunmi Michael: 100%. When I went to view the venue beforehand, it hit me that this was really happening. I’d only been there before as a kid on a school excursion, and once for an exam. Standing there again, knowing I was about to help shape something culturally, was overwhelming; I got emotional at some point.
That story is one I’ll carry for the rest of my life. I’ll be telling people, whenever this comes up years from now, that in 2025, when they reopened the National Theatre with a sold-out Afrobeats orchestral concert, I was the music director. It’s a crucial part of my story.
NoteS: You’ve also spoken at institutions like Guildhall School of Music and Mansfield College, Oxford. What did it mean to be invited into those spaces, and what does it feel like exporting Afrobeats to people who didn’t grow up with the genre?
Seyifunmi Michael: It felt great, and it made me realise there’s real, deep interest in Afrobeats abroad, in the history and culture behind it, not just the sound. The way music is made there is different; a lot of it comes from books and rules, whereas here, we make music from our minds and our spirits. So when they hear something they can’t immediately explain, it fascinates them.
When I spoke, I ended up talking about how rhythmic our languages are- Yoruba and Igbo are tonal- and how our instruments carry history: the talking drum and its family, various horns. What I took away is that people want to understand the spirit behind our music, not just consume it. Even something like the World Cup using African-rooted music makes sense in that light; there’s a reason the sound connects the way it does, something almost ancestral. People doing DNA tests now are constantly finding African, often Nigerian, ancestry, and I think that’s part of what draws them back to this music.
NoteS: Given how central people like you are to shaping an artist’s live sound, does it bother you that the people behind the scenes rarely get the same spotlight as the artist?
Seyifunmi Michael: It’s not just an Afrobeats issue; it’s a global one. Stardom, real celebrity, is such an outsized thing that remembering the people who built it alongside the artist becomes genuinely hard. Nobody’s checking credits before they play a song; they just want to hear it. Celine Dion didn’t write 80 or 90% of her own catalogue, but people rarely look past the voice.
So you just hope to be recognised over time, and you put yourself out there where you can. It’s happening more now, these interviews, this kind of visibility, and I’m grateful for it. We have people like Rotimi, Cobhams, Shiro, Wilson- seriously talented people, but they have to work harder to be seen. Meanwhile, none of these live shows happen without them. I can’t force recognition into existence, but I can keep putting in the work, and hopefully that translates into growth, not just visibility.
NoteS: You had your North American debut in Toronto and New York this past July. How did those shows go?
Seyifunmi Michael: They were powerful. It was essentially an extension of the same orchestral series that started in London and continued in Lagos, now brought to North America. Every market gets its own adjustments; for Toronto, the set list changed, some songs got shorter, others longer, and it was the same story in New York.
I worked with a different orchestra team and conductor in each city. In Toronto, the conductor was Matheus Coelho. Altogether, across everyone involved, it was close to ninety people. It was stressful from a human resources standpoint, but creatively exciting, especially working with some of the biggest conductors in that world, including Igma Thomas, who’s worked with names like Jay-Z and Cudi.
NoteS: You’ve mentioned wanting to do your own orchestral concerts. What other goals are you working toward?
Seyifunmi Michael: As a producer, I want to keep making music that earns its place decades from now, the kind of songs that, when I’m 70 and putting together a set list, people are still showing up for because those songs meant something to them, not just because they’re familiar. I’ve heard people tell me a song I produced helped them through something painful, helped someone heal. Those are the songs I want to keep making, music that touches people the way “Ire” or “Sade” seem to have.
That’s the goal behind everything: building toward a body of work that can carry its own show one day, filled with artists still alive to perform it, sold out, not for the money, but because it means that much.
NoteS: As Afrobeats and orchestral music continue merging and eventually become fully mainstream, what do you want to be remembered for in this era?
Seyifunmi Michael: I want to be remembered as one of the people who shaped the culture, who gave it another face. I’m happy this recognition is starting to happen now, through interviews like this, because it means that when people look back at how this movement started, it won’t read like ancient history; it’ll read like the beginning of something that kept growing.
I tell people all the time, you don’t need five people on stage to make a statement. Chris Brown once performed with just one person up there. It’s about giving people a new way to experience what they already know. When all of this eventually becomes fully mainstream, I want to be known as one of the people who helped shape it before it got there.