I love the tone. It’s a great overdrive. Especially with PAF’s into a tube amp. The only issue is there’s a quieter signal thats exactly the same as the main signal. It can be heard at the end of a chord if you play a whole note. Or maybe it’s a delayed signal? The main signal seems to die off sooner than the quieter signal underneath it. That is, the weaker signal actually has longer sustain or starts after the main signal. Can’t tell which because the main signal drowns out the weaker one at first. But both signals sound identical other than their volume. It can be dealt with by selective palm muting but I’m just wondering is the weaker (or delayed) signal supposed to be there in this pedal? Other than that I love it. Sounds fantastic. Must’ve played it thru my home built Ao35 Carmen Ghia clone for three hours straight today. Very fun. I’m not a big distortion guy either. It’s just a great sounding overdrive. It’s fantastic for any parts that used a Marshall on an album. Anyway,anyone have a similar issue? If not, I’ll be checking and replacing components I guess.
Awful waffle weirdness.
- Thread starter Vilain
- Start date
jubal81
Well-known member
It's just a character of the Hotcake circuit. There are several variations that tinker with this. Aion did a nice writeup in the tracing journal.
I built a dual EL84 Stangray last year and it's awesome. Love that thing. It's basically a Carmen Ghia with an EF86 input tube instead of 12AX7. The tone stack is imminently versatile and massively underrated.
I built a dual EL84 Stangray last year and it's awesome. Love that thing. It's basically a Carmen Ghia with an EF86 input tube instead of 12AX7. The tone stack is imminently versatile and massively underrated.
Erik S
Well-known member
As noted above, some funkyness in the note decay seems to be a thing with these.
I spent some time messing with mine and made some notes if you end up on that path.
https://forum.pedalpcb.com/threads/awful-waffle.28120/
Cool man. Yeah Z tone stacks are great.Theyre what really make his amps different than the Vox’s and Marshall’s that inspire his designs. I built a couple Z/28’s as well as a couple Ghias. Love his stuff. Thanx for the input on the Hotcake, btw. I thought it might be a typical artifact in the design.
andrewsrea
Well-known member
As others have described, the condition of hearing an 'unaffected' signal in parallel with the dirty signal is inherent in the design. Especially when compared to the Rat, which is a similar design to the vintage Hotcake, as the Rat uses diodes in a hard-clip which distort at lower signal voltages. The Hotcake's distortion in the vintage design comes from exceeding the linear limits of the LM741 IC, which requires a much higher signal voltage. When the signal is set to a low gain setting or the note naturally decays, the sound can noticeably go from distortion to linear - sharply and not gradually.
There is a video somewhere on the internet with Neil Finn (Hotcake designer, Paul Crowther was the drummer in Split Enz and made this for Neil). He describes the sensitivity of the pedal to the guitars controls as part of the usefulness.
There is a video somewhere on the internet with Neil Finn (Hotcake designer, Paul Crowther was the drummer in Split Enz and made this for Neil). He describes the sensitivity of the pedal to the guitars controls as part of the usefulness.