Me and my guitar: Hannah Trigwell

After building a fanbase on YouTube, songwriter Hannah Trigwell releases her debut album featuring this unusual Finnish electric...

Flaxwood Rautia

“This is my custom Flaxwood Rautia. I was approached by Zed distribution and they asked me if I wanted to try out any of the Flaxwood models before a show when I was supporting Walk Off The Earth at the O2 Academy in Brixton, which is the biggest show in the UK I’ve ever done. I wanted to try them out because [Lee Bolt] from Walk Off The Earth had one and I thought they looked amazing. So I tried them out backstage and this is the one that fitted me best.”

American Standard Fender Telecaster

“I really like my American Standard Fender Telecaster but it hasn’t been set up in such a long time because this guitar just feels perfect for me. It’s been in a room getting dusty while this is the one that comes out and gets the limelight.”

Thermoplastic

“These guitars are really unique [the body, neck and backplate of a Flaxwood guitar are made in moulds from a fibre-reinforced thermoplastic composite containing spruce called flax] and that’s what gives it the crazy pattern on the body. The neck is a bolt-on. The body is hollow and that affects the weight of it a lot, making it really light and easy to use onstage. Flaxwood guitars [are] more environmentally friendly and although that’s not my highest priority - I want the guitar to be good first and foremost - it is really cool to know that it’s not damaging to the environment because I’d like to not have that guilt with me when I go on tour.”

Switch out

“The way that it’s a custom for me is that they added a switch on because I was a little concerned with [the Seymour Duncan] humbuckers because I was so used to using my Telecaster. That has a twangy, trebly sound and I was concerned it would be too heavy for the stuff I was playing on tour. So they’ve given me an extra control [a coil-split for the humbuckers with a five-way switch] that lets me play with a really trebly tone which is similar to my Telecaster.”

Pedal platform

“The balance between acoustic and electric songs in my live set is about 50/50. When I want to play more upbeat songs I’ll go for this guitar and I use it with a lot of pedals. When I’m playing guitar I usually use my looper pedal, which is the TC Helicon VoiceLive 3 that has voice effects on there as well, which means I can build a really big sound with just one guitar. I also use an [Electro-Harmonix] Analogizer; my VoiceLive 3 pedal has an amp simulation, which is great but the sound is a little too digital for me so I just use that Analogizer pedal to warm things up and it makes a range of weird noises.”

Red all over

“I used this guitar a lot when I was recording my upcoming debut album Red, which fits really well with the colour! I used it on pretty much every song and the album is a mixture of dark pop and really stripped-back acoustic stuff. There’s one particular song called Without You that was just going to be an acoustic track but I realised it worked a hell of a lot better with the tones this was making. So that track is stripped but the tones of this really shine through and that’s one of my favourite tracks from the whole album.”

Red is out now via Hannah’s label Teapot Records.