Beyond Support: How Ogunlowo Daniel Segun also know ask SegzyStringss Became a Guitarist in Demand

By Patrick Ezema

After years spent strengthening other people’s music, Ogunlowo Daniel Segun entered a period in which the invitations themselves began telling a story. Across worship events, international engagements and performances under his own name, the Nigerian guitarist was increasingly being asked to bring his musicianship into very different rooms.

There is a difference between being needed in a band and being asked for by name.

For much of Ogunlowo Daniel Segun’s career, his work could be heard through other people’s music. He played lead guitar, rhythm guitar, acoustic guitar and bass, often in settings where the singer naturally received more attention than the instrumentalists around them.

That kind of work can teach a guitarist plenty. It teaches patience. It exposes bad timing quickly. It forces the player to understand that a technically impressive part can still be the wrong part.

By 2023, something around Segun’s work had started to change.

An invitation that September asked him to travel from the United Kingdom to Biel, Switzerland, as a guest musician for the twentieth anniversary of the Hour of Encounter Conference. The organisers also committed to covering his transport and accommodation.

The interesting part is not that Segun was travelling abroad. International performance was hardly new to him by then.

What matters is why he was being brought into the room.

Years of playing behind singers had given Segun a musical vocabulary that was broad without depending entirely on lead guitar. He could move into rhythm, work on acoustic guitar and approach a song from the bass as well. More importantly, those roles had taught him different ways of listening.

That experience became useful as the settings around him began to vary.

In October 2023, Segun played guitar at Warehouse Worship at the Copper Box Arena in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. He worked as part of a larger team of musicians and worship leaders in an event that brought together thousands of worshippers. The organiser later described his contribution as an important part of the musical performance.

A month later, another invitation placed him in a different professional situation.

Charisma Plein Evangile in France invited Sinach and her team for a special service at Charisma Eglise Chrétienne. Segun was individually named among the members considered essential to the artist’s team for the engagement.

Then came a performance that changed the emphasis again.

At a Count Down Community fundraising event in Orpington, Segun appeared under his professional identity, SegzyStringss. Here, the attention was more directly attached to his own performance. The organisation later recorded that the response from the guests led to an encore.

Within a relatively short period, Segun had been asked to do three different jobs.

At the Copper Box Arena, he had to understand his place within a large worship team. In France, he was working within the professional structure surrounding an established international artist. At Count Down, considerably more of the responsibility for engaging the room fell on him.

The guitar had not changed.

The expectations had.

That distinction says more about professional demand than a long list of venues ever could.

The first booking can come through recommendation, circumstance or somebody remembering a previous performance. Being asked again usually requires something more.

For a working guitarist, technique is only part of that equation. There is the less visible business of arriving prepared, understanding arrangements, responding to singers and remaining useful when a performance stops behaving exactly as it did in rehearsal.

Segun’s versatility gives him several ways of dealing with those situations, although versatility by itself is not especially interesting. Plenty of musicians can play more than one instrument.

What matters is whether moving between those instruments changes the decisions they make.

Bass encourages Segun to think about pulse and harmonic movement. Rhythm guitar requires him to pay attention to space. Lead guitar presents almost the opposite temptation. There are more opportunities to become noticeable, which makes judgement about when to remain quiet even more important.

That relationship with space has followed Segun through much of his career.

He is most convincing when he does not treat every opening in an arrangement as permission to fill it.

In contemporary gospel, that restraint matters. A singer may extend a section or repeat a chorus while the band gradually increases the intensity underneath. The obvious response from a guitarist is to add more.

The better response is sometimes to wait.

Segun’s years around singers appear to have made him comfortable with that decision. He can use melodic lines, rhythmic figures and sustained textures when the arrangement needs them, but his playing is generally stronger when those choices grow out of what the rest of the band is already doing.

That helps explain his usefulness as a supporting musician.

It does not completely explain his identity as an artist.

By 2024, the distinction was becoming harder to ignore. His performance activity included engagements in Manchester, Switzerland and France. That year also placed him at London’s O2 Arena in a performance setting with gospel artist Dunsin Oyekan.

The change of artist is more revealing than the size of the venue.

A guitarist can become very good at understanding one singer. He learns the repertoire, the cues, the preferred tones and the places where the arrangement is likely to open up.

Working with somebody else removes some of that familiarity.

The songs change. Communication changes. The band may change. Even the amount of space available to the guitar can change.

Segun’s ability to move between those environments suggests that what people were responding to was not simply his familiarity with one artist’s music.

Sinach remains an important part of his professional history, but she does not explain all of it.

That matters.

For a musician who spent years contributing to other people’s performances, becoming useful outside one established relationship is an important test. It asks whether the musician has learned a repertoire or learned how to work.

Segun increasingly appeared capable of the latter.

There is another part of that work that audiences are less likely to see.

Recording sessions have formed part of his professional life, with Segun working on lead, rhythm and acoustic guitar alongside artists and producers.

Studio playing asks for a different kind of discipline. A live phrase disappears into the next moment. A recorded phrase stays there.

Timing that feels acceptable on stage can become irritating after repeated listening. Tone has nowhere to hide. A guitarist also has to accept that the part which best serves the recording may be much smaller than the one he first imagined playing.

There is an additional problem for musicians working in this space. The audience can hear their contribution without necessarily knowing who made it.

Individual instrumentalists are not always visible in the public information surrounding a release. That makes the finished recording an imperfect measure of the musician’s public identity, even where session work has formed a genuine part of the career.

For Segun, that creates an interesting contradiction.

His professional value has partly depended on becoming good at making other people’s music work. The better he becomes at that job, the easier it can be for the listener to experience the result without thinking about the guitarist at all.

Being called is not the same as being known.

That distinction is important because professional demand can easily be mistaken for artistic recognition. They overlap, but they are not interchangeable.

Artists, churches and organisers may value a musician because he is reliable, adaptable and sensitive to the needs of a performance. An audience looking for an individual artist may be listening for something else. A particular tone. A phrasing habit. A musical decision that identifies the guitarist before his name appears.

Segun has made considerably more progress with the first question than the second.

There are characteristics that recur in his work. Restraint is one. His preference for melodic placement over constant display is another. His experience across bass and guitar also gives him an awareness of the band underneath him.

Yet it would be premature to argue that every Segun performance now carries an unmistakable sonic signature.

That is where the next artistic challenge sits.

The period from 2023 to 2025 is interesting precisely because the professional story was moving faster than that question could be answered.

The Switzerland invitation had presented him specifically as a guest musician. Warehouse Worship placed him inside a large UK worship event. The France invitation documented his position within an international artist’s team. Count Down placed greater attention on Segun himself and produced an encore. Work with different artists subsequently tested whether his adaptability could survive outside one familiar musical relationship.

By 2025, his UK activity included another gospel concert setting at House of Praise in London.

These opportunities did not all come from the same organisation, artist or type of performance.

That is what makes the pattern worth examining.

Segun does not need to abandon support in order to move beyond being defined by it. The ability to strengthen another person’s music is one of the reasons these opportunities developed in the first place.

The harder task is carrying that discipline into a musical identity that belongs more clearly to him.

That may require fewer demonstrations of versatility rather than more of them. At some point, an artist has to decide which instincts are worth repeating until listeners begin to associate those choices with the person making them.

Segun has already shown that he can enter different rooms and make himself useful.

The next stage is making the sound as recognisable as the musician increasingly being requested to produce it.

By late 2025, that question remained open.

But something around it had clearly changed.

Ogunlowo Daniel Segun was no longer only finding places to play.

Some of those places were beginning to find him.