Get the tone

Louis was a traditionalist, favouring a hollowbody archtop on the neck pickup, with flatwound strings into a small, clean combo. Much of his huge warm sound came from his picking technique, most often close to the neck with a slight tilt to the pick so that when executing downstrokes it almost comes to rest on the next string down. This sets the string in a wide elliptical vibration pattern and makes the sound rounder and bigger. Try it.