Making some hotcakes!

Someone very important to me frequently confessed her desire for hotcakes. She also said that she loved when I made her waffles for breakfast. I know there is a difference between hotcakes and waffles, but when I built a Crowther Hot Cake pedal clone called the FlapJack I named it Pao's Waffles, in her honor. I really like that pedal, but when I heard the Bluesberry mode on an actual Hot Cake, I decided it was time to build an actual Hot Cake clone, since I could never afford a real one (Sorry Paul!). The only issue was trying to find a layout that included the Bluesberry mod, which I eventually did. With the board cut, the parts packed and the soldering iron hot, it was time to bake some hotcakes.

The layout in question also included the option for the extra low frequency, which I simply omitted to save a capacitor and switch. All I wanted was a straight forward Hot Cake clone with Bluesberry mode. Initially my build had very low gain and some oscillation, but I knifed the cracks between the traces to make sure there weren't any solder bridges and that seems to have taken care of everything. Once everything was said and done I said what I always say about every pedal I build; I don't know how true this is to the original, but it sounds pretty good. Listening to youtube demos through headphones and comparing it to the circuit I just built by setting them the same isn't completely without faults, but it's gotten me close enough in almost every build so far.

I originally wanted to buy and build a Madbean Fritter/Short Stack because it's tiny enough to fit into a 1590a. This of course would be a joke about height at the expensive of said important person, for whom I would have built the pedal and gifted it to. At some point I'll compare Pao's Waffles with the Hot Cake clone and see which one I like best. Heck, they might actually be far enough apart that I like them both, and they might sound great stacked. More testing must be done, but later of course.

As we find ourselves almost in September I find myself with only a handful of projects left to do. Hopefully September's weather facilitates the ability to finish these builds, and leaves a little bit of time for me to work on a few of the pedals that didn't quite work out as I had hoped. If I accomplish all the projects I have ready to go I will have done thirty-three builds this year alone. That means hopefully I can focus on buying and building enclosures for all these circuits in 2024. We'll just have to see how that all works out.