Crowther Prunes & Custard

The Prunes & Custard is, essentially “The other pedal” made by Paul Crowther, the mind behind the Hotcake. It was introduced to the world in the late 90s and there have been some versions that lacked the top left switch, but as far as I can tell, the pedal stayed otherwise unchanged since introduction.
It is called a Harmonic Generator-Intermodulator. That has a certain ring to it. It could be a device that Geordy La Forge uses to recalibrate the shield matrix of the Enterprise.
If you’re unsure how everything works, just have a look in the manual. Only there is none – or is there?
It’s basically printed on the pedal itself. Level, Drive and the mode switch do what they do. Then there’s a mix knob and another switch that names itself “Contour” and allows for a selection of Off, Deep and Wide. That switch works in tandem with the mix knob.
The pedal itself shows the same quality components I’ve seen on the Hotcake. Paul and his wife make them by hand. The knobs have a very good resistance to them. You need some force to turn them, but once set, you can rest easy – transport or a cable rubbing against them will not change your settings.

I plugged in the pedal and went for a fairly common approach. I set the mode switch to Bass, the contour switch to deep and all the knobs to noon.

Let me say that I was not prepared for the results. You get a solid sizzle from one end, sounding already fuzz’esque, but the other end, the one that does the Harmonic Generator-Intermodulator bit, sends a strong bouquet of overtones, mostly odd harmonic, into the signal. The attack and decay of those notes, triggered by a bass guitar sounds not unlike a fuzz playing into an envelope filter. This is very sensitive to the dynamics you create with your fingertips – and even more sensitive to the volume knob on the (passive) bass. I quickly realize that there is no need for a manual because it’s all acting up and you feel a bit like raking leaves in a cyclone. There is a strong interaction between gain, mix and the contour switch. Whenever you have a setting that does sound somewhat pleasant, and you want to change a single parameter, you find yourself changing everything until you’ve hit another setting where they all agree with each other.
I was able to produce some really weird effects within the first five minutes of experimentation.
A tone where the bass sounds mostly unchanged with soft and medium playing, but shoots a synthy spike, like triggering an envelope, whenever I plucked hard.
With the mix knob all the way CCW, it’s kind of a boring fuzz pedal. There is a serious low pass going on between the preamp circuit and the madness circuit. With the gain and mix knob all the way up, you can use your bass to send a fax through a phone line.

That low pass makes a lot of sense, actually. With the signal feeding the Harmonic Generator-Intermodulator lacking all sorts of high end, the generated harmonics have no treble content to compete against. Which makes the “Intermodulator” bit somewhat redundant, or obsolete? I mean Intermodulation only really works with two signal sources and if there is nothing the output of the Harmonic Generator can mingle with, one might debate that there can be no intermodulation.
I do sense that this line of thinking will only cause me to hang up on semantics and maybe get stuck in an infinite loop, so I quickly seize all neural activity and play on, trying to figure out what things do.

Only to find that things elude all my attempts to determine their exact function. I’m pretty sure the left switch switches the center frequency of the madness circuit, but it’s not as simple as the print suggests (use left for guitar and right for bass). I enjoyed the guitar setting just as much as the bass setting.
The Contour switch that goes from wide to deep to off seems to apply some EQ curve. All I can say is that it sounds somewhat processed when set to wide, somewhat processed, but differently when set to deep and raw and unprocessed when set to off.
The main interaction is between the gain and mix knobs, and these obviously work as advertised With the mix knob you control the intermodulation between the low passed signal and the Harmonic Generator output. With the gain knob you decide how wild that Harmonic Generator is allowed to get – and it usually pays off to fine tune those two. Back off the mix a bit and increase the gain or vice versa.

This pedal should not be among the first choices when you are looking for a drive pedal. Strictly technical speaking, it IS a drive pedal, most likely to be categorized as a fuzz, but it is by no means meant to be used as such. The Harmonic Generator operates very sensitive to the input signal and the result (in most cases) sounds like an envelope filter working. This pedal can do a limited number of very funky synth sounds that are usually done by at least two pedals – and it’s all analog.
I’ve looked at a few reviews on Youtube. The feeling I got there was that most of the people said that this is among the weirdest pedals in their collection. They took it out of the cupboard, where it sat all the way in the back, blew off the dust and remarked how they have not played it in years.
“If you’ve not used it in years and you think it’s the weirdest pedal you have, why keep it around?” was the first question that popped up in my mind. Now I know. You’re waiting for that day when THAT sound is called for. A huge grin spreads on your face, you open up the cupboard, get it out and plug it in.
I can see that now. After playing it on and off for a couple of weeks now, every time I discover some nice sound in there, my mind starts racing, trying to find a proper application for that sound. I’ll probably stuff mine in the cupboard at some point, waiting for the day to arrive.

Here’s a snippet. First pass is the Prunes & Custard. Second pass is the 3Leaf Doom2 fuzz into the PastFX PX101 envelope filter (a clone of the Moog MF-101). Both run into my normal signal chain (Cali76, Broughton RFE, Noble Preamp), but on both, some Chorus from an Analogman Mini Chorus (with deep switch) is added.