Crowther Hotcake

Paul Crowther lives in New Zealand and has made the first Hotcake pedal in 1976. The circuit has seen some revisions since then, but essentially the pedal has stayed the same.
In a nutshell: Two modifications were implemented over the years, and for a while, there were two different versions of the Hotcake, but at some point, the standard Hotcake simply received two switches that let the user toggle between the options, so the current version of the pedal (called 2020) can do it all.
Crowther Audio did expand the portfolio in the decades to follow the 70’s. With a double version of the Hotcake and the Prunes&Custard, they offer a total of three different pedals by now. All hand made by Paul and his wife in New Zealand. The Hotcake is, somehow, one of the most famous unknown pedals out there. Crowther mostly sells direct, and being in NZ, he’s basically off the map for most people. There are some quite famous users of the Hotcake, Mark Knopfler among them. Most pedal people I talk to know these from seeing them on boards or through the internet, but hardly any of them have ever played one – but not for a lack of interest. It’s just that they are not so easy to find for a good price and shipping them from NZ to Europe is too much of a hassle.
After looking for a Hotcake for a long time, I decided that the hassle of shipping around the globe (or across the disk for those who follow Mark Sargent or Terry Pratchett) is to be endured, should I want to sate my curiosity in the foreseeable future, so I bit the bullet and placed an order.

Shipping went a lot faster than anticipated, so I held the Hotcake in my hands but a few days later.
First impressions are good. Standard enclosure, sadly equipped with side jacks, good components.
Everything feels solid – and the knobs have a nice amount of friction to them. You’ll need not worry about losing your pedal settings upon transport, even if you have to ride a bumpy road to the venue.
The inside of the pedal holds a battery compartment. The PCB is gooped up with … goop, to obscure the inner workings. There’s a card on top of the goop, hand signed by Paul Crowther.
There’s not much more to do than to plug it in and hit some strings.

Here’s a rundown of what my ears tell me what the controls do after a few minutes of playing:
Level does volume and holds no surprises.
Drive does gain. It passes signal with the knob at zero, but the whole thing gets louder if you increase Drive. There is a point where it really wakes up, with my low output bass that point is around 10 o’clock.
Presence is a tricky one. It certainly adds upper mids and treble content when sitting past noon. My ears tell me there is an emphasis on the 1-1,5kHz range, but I could of course be mistaken. I get more note definition and more finger noise, but in a good way.
The XCF switch that is supposed to let more bass through works in a subtle manner and I had to check with headphones to confirm it really works.
The Cream switch seems to dampen the top end – or it dampens the top end of the driven signal. The driven sound loses sting and feels a bit blunted, so you can run the Drive knob higher than you would in the not-Cream setting.

With the Drive at zero, the pedal gives off a slight coloration to my ear. Nothing drastic, but I imagine to be able to tell whether it’s on or off in that setting in a blind test. I feel like there is a slightly pronounced articulation in the high mids, but some of the top end is missing – but we’re talking about the useless spectrum of 8k +.
Sweeping through the gain, I quickly find that the higher settings are not my cup of tea. The clipping is somewhat harsh, but by no means brutal. I personally like a drive to be either smooth or face melting, but the Hotcake in the higher settings feels like it’s somewhere in the no-mans-land in the middle between those two. I’m pretty sure that many people will love it for that, but my personal taste begs to differ. I quickly found that with the Drive at lower settings, I feel more at home.
With the presence turned up well past noon, It breathes life and freshness back into by worn flats. There’s a harder attack and more pronunciation to the beginning of each note as the string leaves my fingertip. There is also a boxy feeling with stronger mids, that feels a bit hollowed out. In short: When you play a J setup favoring the neck pickup into the Hotcake, it sounds more like a P bass. Not exactly like a P bass, but take the J, point it in the direction of the P and then give it a shove, so it stumbles forward in that direction for a few steps. The breakup in those settings is a bit of an afterthought and there is a fizz around the edges, a solid one that feels like taking a sip from a soda that was carbonated way too harshly.

Sound Snippets:
Hotcake with Presence at 3 o’clock and Drive just on the brink of audible breakup at 10 o’clock:

Hotcake with Presence at 3 o’clock and Drive at 11 o’clock:

P bass with a pick, Presence at 2 o’clock and Drive at 2 o’clock