About Mayasonic
Mayasonic was founded in 2025 to continue the quest to create the most responsive and majestic sounding guitar pedals ever. To me, pedals should be more than an "effect" — they should be an instrument unto itself. And most of my designs are foundational — they are designed to be a core part of your sound.
I've been designing guitar pedals now for over fifteen years — including many of your favorites from the Catalinbread and kittycasterFX catalogs.
With Mayasonic I will continue to design and build the best pedals I can. It all starts with the love of music and the legend and lore of the electric guitar — and the sense of potential to make it even better.
I've always tried to dial in my circuits to perfection, obsessing on the breadboard for months with guitar in hand until I got the tone and the feel that I was looking for. My design mantra has always been — when it feels right to the fingers, it will sound right to the ears.
Each Mayasonic pedal is handbuilt by me into my custom bent aluminum wedge enclosure design. The circuit recipes utilize through-hole components carefully selected to achieve my exacting sonic goals.
Thanks for checking out Mayasonic Pedals. I really appreciate all the support, encouragement, and kind comments about my pedals and videos that you've given me over the years. That's what has kept me going. I'm glad to be a part of your musical journey 💜💛❤️.
Third time's a charm!
Keep on rocking and making that music,
Howard
My journey as a pedal designer — it was an accident!
Read on for the story of how I got started designing guitar pedals and what led me to founding Mayasonic.
Third time's a charm.
photo 2011
I've designed a few!
Have you heard of the Belle Epoch Deluxe? Or the Groovy Wizard, Tremdriver, and Mohair? Remember the Dirty Little Secret or the Karma Suture? Love rocking out on the Sabbra Cadabra or getting regal with the Galileo? Ever plug the Talisman plate reverb into a dirty amp? Maybe you've spiced up your amp with a Naga Viper or explored new worlds with the Antichthon.
I was the circuit designer for all those pedals and more that I can't remember off the top of my head right now. Oh, I do remember that the Merkin fuzz was the first pedal I ever designed. That was a good one too. It was released back in 2011. I do everything by feel — the circuit has to feel good to play or else I'm not done with it yet.
The pedals in the photo are some of the ones I designed. There’s more. But each one represented months and months of obsessive tweaking and tuning. I did all that work from home so literally nobody on the team saw exactly how much work I put into each circuit.
You may know me from that body of work as well as countless YouTube videos I've done at the previous ventures.
Circumstances beyond my control led me to where I am today, in 2025, to starting anew yet again with Mayasonic Pedals. This time it's going to be very lean & mean. This time there won't be coworkers or founders or other owners. I'm launching Mayasonic on my own. Unfortunately, I have no connection or affiliation with any of the old companies and I have no stake in any of my old designs. So I've got no choice but to solider on and manifest and remanifest.
It was kind of an accident.
You see, I never set out to be a designer of pedals. All I was ever interested in was playing guitar and getting better at that. But back in 2007 I was in a transition period and I needed to find some work. I ended up working at Catalinbread but when I started working there I didn't know the first thing about making a guitar pedal, much less designing the circuit for one. I was that guy if the battery wire broke on a pedal I wouldn't know what to do to fix it.
So at the beginning I just helped building the pedals—soldering boards, drilling holes in enclosures—all stuff that I wasn't really all that good at. I helped test the batches of pedals too. I didn't know anything about electronics but I certainly knew what I thought sounded good or not. Eventually I became the "ears" and helped to voice some pedals by playing the prototypes and going, "It needs tighter bass. OK, now it's too stiff feeling and the trebles are harsh. It needs to be more spongy." — stuff like that.
That photo of me is from 2012 in the Catalinbread bunker testing prototypes.
The eureka moment.
Like I said, I wasn't interested in learning about electronics but I was interested in guitar sounds. I was obsessed with guitar sounds. Besides, I couldn't even read a schematic. I had barely any idea of what all the symbols and connections meant.
But one day a friend who was moving gave me this breadboard he had. He said, "Hey ya want this? If you don't I'm gonna chuck it." I told him to chuck it but then on second thought I said, "Here, I'll take it home and put it on the shelf for a while and then I'll chuck it."
I forgot all about it but then one cold winter day a few months later I was listening to Hendrix and wondering how he made the fuzz face sound like that. Suddenly I got the urge to see if I could make that sound so I got that breadboard off the shelf and printed out a schematic for the fuzz face. I spent literally the entire day trying to place the parts on the board according to the schematic. My brain hurt from the effort. It was not easy for me. I'd put one leg of a part on the breadboard and then I'd be lost. After a few hours I finally thought maybe I had everything connected. I was completely prepared for it to not work in which case I'd be chucking the breadboard in the garbage like I promised my friend.
I plugged my white Strat into it and turned on the amp. I hit a chord and.... I was greeted with amazing fuzz tone. Whoa!!! It works!!! Holy shit.
And that was my gateway drug. I started doing experiments on that circuit — what happens if I change this capacitor? What does that resistor do? Let's try a different transistor. I suddenly became obsessed with tweaking circuits on the breadboard to see if I could get them to sound the way I always wanted things to sound. I wanted to find the magic.
That's that first breadboard in the photo — the one with the two tall transistors and the long blue capacitor.
It was the first one.
So even though the very first circuit I learned was the fuzz face circuit, I had never released one. During the winter of 2025 when I was working to get Mayasonic started, I decided I would finally come up with a pedal based on the beloved fuzz face and make that the first pedal in the Mayasonic lineup. Yes, the first one is now the fuzz one. And If I was going to finally release my take on the fuzz face, it was going to be my ultimate version, the one I've always wanted to exist.
I spent the winter armed with all the tricks I've learned through the years to finally make my ultimate fuzz face. I came up with a circuit that has three transistors instead of the usual two a fuzz face style pedal has (no, not a Tone Bender though!). But it was really more about what not to do rather than just piling on features. With fuzzes, signal and power rail purity is crucial and small changes can have big impacts.
By the way, Weirdbeard72 has been doing the graphics for every pedal I've ever designed since the very first one and we're continuing that tradition with Mayasonic ❤️💛💜. In fact, he was the one that came up with the name Mayasonic!
So anyway, this is just a brief history of how I got started designing pedals. Check out the photo album below for some random moments from my career in making the best pedals I could.
And that was the first phase of my pedal designer journey.
But that was then and now is now. I have no connection or affiliation with those companies anymore so for me it is just a memory and part of the journey. I am not endorsing or promoting any past products that I may have been affiliated with even though those products are intensely personal to me. I had put my all into them.
The only thing I can stand behind now is my new work with Mayasonic Pedals.
Thanks for checking out this page and thanks for your interest in Mayasonic Pedals!
Howard, May 2025
