[FrankHudson]

I'm in the "he didn't cause me to get into archtops, but he reminded me..." group.

One of the things that he reminded me of, is that they sometimes fit into contexts that you don't think of as conventional use for an archtop. Until Rawlings, you didn't see them mixed with flat top acoustic much. As it is with much attractive playing, we often imprint on the instrument as the cause of the sound (ignoring the player's impact) but in this case it opened up minds to reconsider this kind of instrument.

I've never really got to grips with an appropriate purely acoustic sound from an archtop, but I enjoy them at low volume with a magnetic pickup plugged into a clean amp, which is a sort of semi-acoustic thing.