The Hotcake was first produced in 1976, while Paul Crowther was in the UK with the band, Split Enz. The Hotcake is designed to leave the undistorted component of the guitar sound unchanged, while providing a nice fat distortion sound without resorting to a treble cut circuit which will also affect the guitar tonality. With the Drive and Presence controls set to minimum, and the Level at around 2 o'clock, you should be hard pressed to hear any change in the sound at all when you switch the Hotcake in and out. You can get a clean volume boost by increasing the Level control. Increasing the Drive will give you a thick distortion sound with a little bit of edge to it, and the Presence control adds some mid-range punch to the sounds. The Hotcake also handles chords well. It is recommended that the Hotcake is patched between the guitar and amplifier, rather than into an amplifier's effect loop. Generally speaking, if you are happy with your guitar and amplifier combination, the Hotcake will work well as a primary distortion.

The Prunes & Custard is a two stage circuit. There is a preamp stage, the gain of which is adjusted with the Drive control. This stage is followed by a special wave-shaping distortion circuit. There is some treble roll-off between the preamp and the special distortion circuit. The frequency at which this treble roll-off happens can be changed with the Guitar/Bass switch. The special distortion stage produces strong harmonic overtones, mostly odd harmonic. Higher harmonics are progressively introduced with increased Drive settings and signal level, so a decaying bass guitar note can sound like a mean swept filter. Playing double notes, like 4ths or 5ths can produce some strong intermodulation effects, rather like a ring modulator, but more musical, albeit more distorted! The Mix control is a balance between the preamp stage output (ccw), and the special distortion stage output (cw). For bass guitar, the Mix control would usually be set at around 10 to 12 o'clock. For guitar, a high Mix setting, along with reduced Drive can give some rather pleasant overdrive effects. When the Drive and Mix controls are set to higher settings, the sound can become all harmonics, with very little fundamental signal, and in some situations may sound a bit thin, especially for bass guitar, but setting the Lo Freq. contour switch to the right takes some low frequency from the Preamp side of the Mix control and mixes it back with the special distortion side.

The Double Hotcake has two Hotcakes 'A' and 'B' in one box. The A is a Bluesberry version, and the B a normal version (the "Bluesberry" voicing of the Hotcake has a slightly less buzzy edge at the onset of distortion, and often works well when guitarists have amplifiers with extra extreme treble boost, like some Marshalls for instance). Both have three knobs and a footswitch as with regular Hotcakes. If both Hotcakes are switched on together, the A Hotcake drives the B, and its controls are bypassed, but an extra Drive control is switched in to adjust the its gain. There is also an extra clipping stage and a reduction in low frequencies to make for a better lead sound in the high gain situation. The A Hotcake has the usual buffered bypass (the circuit becomes a buffer in bypass mode), while the B Hotcake is hard bypassed using gold plated contacts.