JOE WALLACE: You -- Tell me a little bit about your work. What do you do as a singer, a songwriter and a teacher and you're obviously doing endorsement work with Daisy Rock so you know you got some more exposure there? How has the endorsement affected your work?

NIKKI O'NEILL: It's been really good. It's helped me a lot. So I'm a singer, a songwriter and guitarist, and I've been -- I worked in New York for a couple of years and I recently moved to LA. I do a lot of R&B, Reggae, and Funk work, that's my specialty, and with Daisy Rock. It's been really great. I have had chance to do TV performances and it's been a wonderful exposure to my career as a musician, and I also got guitars I'm very comfortable and happy playing with so this is -- their guitars are great for me so I can honestly feel proud to endorse them.

JOE WALLACE: Now, your career path is a little different than a lot of musicians here at NAMM. You do a lot of teaching, you do the translation work for Daisy Rock, and things like that. Do you think that there are other people that can follow the way you've gone? You're not -- I mean you've got your irons in a lot of different fires and, you know, to really make it in a sort of non-traditional creative type of work, you really have to be a renaissance person. What was it like discovering how many different things you had to do in order to keep moving forward?

NIKKI O'NEILL: Well, I started out with music journalism so alongside with music, so just the idea of selling yourself was -- and you have to come up with ideas, sell articles, so you have to be a creative mindset, and I think a lot of professional musicians, the teaching, writing articles for guitar magazines and stuff like that is nothing unusual. I really believe in the idea that, you know, if people aren't giving you work, you can't just wait around. You create your own work, and it kind of started with me teaching private lessons, and at first when I was just teaching to everybody, I just had moderate success but when I started making a niche that was like for female students, suddenly it just bombed, you know, it exploded. So I understood that, "Wow! This is like there's definitely a demand for this," and it just kind of snowballed with a university class in New York City where I was teaching a rock and blues class and, you know, teaching the licks of Heart and Bonnie Raitt and stuff like that. People were really interested in that, and then it grew to being a panelist at different women's music conferences, and I went over to Sweden to a rock college that's for women only over there. They heard about me, and so it's just kind of snowballed and I think you got to be creative, think of ways to getting work, and you find your path, and it's not the same for everybody. For me, a little bit education seems to have been like a successful path and I combined that with an artist career, and I think that yeah, that's going to be something I'll be doing, you know, because I'm happy with it, what I do well, and it seems to work out well for me too, so that's yeah.

JOE WALLACE: Now at NAMM, one of the seminars this weekend is called "Pretty Good for a Girl", and there's a panel of successful women in the music industry, and you'd think that we'd be a little further along than having to need these kind of discussions, but we're not really but what do you think the future is like? I mean is this business going to evolve?

NIKKI O'NEILL: I think so but it's going to take time. I think with Daisy Rock's experience, what I've understood is that you have to market guitars to girls in a different way. It's you have to think of other ideas to get them out to them because there -- a lot of girls won't go into the guitar stores, and you just have to have a different approach than the traditional brands, and I think a lot of guitar stores/dealers are slowly catching on to that because obviously they want sales. It doesn't matter if it's like male, female, or whatever, you know, is coming in, so they're learning but it's yeah. It just requires different ways of getting the guitars out and different kinds of events and stuff so I think it's a work in progress and, you know, it's going to take a little while, but it's definitely going on the right direction, so.

JOE WALLACE: So what's ahead for you career-wise? Are you putting out a CD? Are you going on tour? What's ahead?

NIKKI O'NEILL: You know I just moved to LA in July from New York City and I'm currently doing some songwriting with [PH] Sly and Robbie, the Reggae rhythm section, which is really exciting, and I'm also recording an album with a guy who's music director with Lauryn Hill, so it's like a R&B, reggae, kind of roots based album, so I'm really excited and that's what I have in mind now and then probably some touring in the summer or fall, so.

JOE WALLACE: All right. Great. Well thank you very much.

NIKKI O'NEILL: Thank you.