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.

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 soldier 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.

Photo album of the old days in my life as a pedal designer

Breadboard

2011

I couldn't tell you how many hours I've spent over the past fifteen years sitting there with a guitar while hunching over a breadboard obsessively swapping parts and trying ideas until I finally got the result I was looking for — magical and dynamic tonal response.

Since I've Been Loving You

2012

Here's the rig I used for probably the most-watched demo video I've ever done. R8, RAH, Vibrolux. I listened to Zep 24/7 while developing that pedal. Twist my arm!

My first NAMM

2012

It was my first time at NAMM and I was the main person in the booth doing the demos and interviews. I remember what a shock to the system it was to go from my quiet life with my cat to being around thousands of people. I also remember the Sound Police got to know me real well. What can I say, the pedals I design were designed to project! 😎

Hanging out at NAMM

2012

Occasionally I'd get to leave the booth and walk around with Nic (R.I.P.), founder of Catalinbread, to say hi to people. Here, we're with Jamie from Earthquaker. Like I said, I never aspired to be a part of the pedal gear scene but here I am and there I was!

Fine-tuning prototypes

2011

Breadboards and prototype chassis. That was my life. I'd refine and modify and tweak until I thought I found the magic zone. This photo is the first prototype for the Royal Albert Hall pedal. It's weird to look at all these old pics. I wanted to share some of my history for this About page and looking back at these I remember just how obsessively committed I was to getting the circuit to do exactly what I wanted. It's too bad I have to keep starting over but Mayasonic is going to rock 🤘😎.

Laying out a circuit board

2012

Besides learning how to create circuits I also had to make the circuit boards. It's like solving a puzzle, trying to get the parts to fit just right on the board. I think I was working on the Galileo pedal here. By the way, I heard Brian May recently thought my pedal was the best Queen-in-the-box pedal he'd ever played and he played them all, so I've read. I'd love to be able to talk to him and thank him for that. But alas, I was long gone when he found out about it.

The second pedal I designed

2011

The second pedal I ever designed was one called Perseus. It was a sub-octave pedal and my idea was to make a better Blue Box. I knew I was in over my head to attempt something somewhat complex like that but I breadboarded obsessively until I came up with something I thought was super cool. I've never made a direct clone of anything. I always try to realize my own vision of what a thing could be. But after I was successful with my Perseus pedal idea and we put it out for sale, I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, I guess I know how to do this, this pedal designing thing. Who woulda thunk. Huh."

Award?!

2013

Apparently my Octapussy pedal won an award or something? I don't remember that. I found it in my photo library. I love octave fuzzes and I'm planning on doing one with Mayasonic. All these pedals are like my children that I never get to see. Imagine if you wrote and recorded an album and then you lost your rights to your own fricken songs. It's kinda like that. So much work and love and care only to have nothing to show for it at the end.

NAMM yet again

2015

By now I was a veteran of working several NAMMs. It was pretty cool to meet and mingle with people but I remember mostly missing my cat the entire time.

Vocal recording for a pedal demo

2013

I think this is the only time I ever sang on a pedal demo. Guess which song/pedal? Has anyone ever sang on a pedal demo?!

Meeting people at NAMM

2014

You'd think from these photos that I was always out and about but the opposite is true. I spent 95% of the time sitting there in front of that breadboard. Here I'm with the guitarist from Blue Oyster Cult, a lovely person. I've gone by the handle "kittycaster" since 2004 I think. It was just a name I used on the Harmony-Central forum and I kinda ended up being known as that in the online world. But it wasn't my idea to name a pedal brand that. And look how that turned out.

Local pedal event

2012

I think this was for the launch of the Echorec? There's actually not that many photos of me through the years so running into any of these is a surprise. My photo library is 95% pics of my cats.

My cat and prototype pedals

2011

She was with me for every pedal I've ever designed until 2021 when she left this realm. She heard every note that came out of those breadboards. She was with me for over twenty years. Her name was Maya.

Meeting Andy Summers

2015

At yet another NAMM. Met quite a few people that particular year including Andy Summers. I ran into him again a couple NAMMs later when I was showing off my Belle Epoch Deluxe. He really really wanted to get one for an upcoming tour. I remember I had to cobble together a prototype just for him since we were still a few months away from being able to release it.

Backstage with Eric Johnson

2015

I don't remember what I was showing him but I can assure you it was a pedal of some sort. I can tell you though that he used to call me regularly asking for a batch of Belle Epoch delay pedals. He wanted us to send him a dozen and then he would test each one and keep the one that worked the best with his specific rig. Hey, this is Eric Johnson, right? I know what he means though—they're all the same, yet they're all subtly different, with the discrete analog transistor audio path circuitry I designed for it. Unfortunately, after that company imploded and we all, the entire team, quit, I lost touch with some of these awesome musicians.

Prototype pedal

2016

This was the first new pedal I worked on after the tragic death of Nicholas Harris, the founder of Cbread. I remember the team's collective resolve was to carry on and keep on keeping on. But things were not sustainable and we were in an untenable situation. A similar, yet complete different dynamic, would end up happening at kittycasterFX. You get knocked down and then you get up and you try to keep on keeping on again.

In-store pedal clinic

2015

This was a demo clinic I did at Five Star Guitar. I've done a few in-store demo clinics and they're pretty enjoyable for all involved I think. I would talk about my philosophy of how to use pedals and then do some demo playing. Then there's a Q & A afterward. If we're lucky someone bought donuts.

Some Echo Unit

2016

Here's the breadboard for the most ambitious pedal I've done so far. I was tired of everyone's "tape echo" pedals, including our own. If you want it to sound like an Echoplex, make it like an Echoplex, I thought. So I reproduced the circuity, not just the "preamp" everyone talks about, but ALL the audio path circuitry. I put it up exactly like the EP-3 — except in place of the tape heads I put a digital delay line. Then I went back and tuned the audio circuitry obsessively until I could get it as magical as I could. It would be the last thing I did at that company. I'd love to take another attempt at it but I don't have the ability to do something that ambitious in a company that's just myself. We'll see how things evolve...

Another NAMM here we go

2017

Packing up the prototypes for the trade show. The last things I designed there. They're really quite good. I wanted to go next level from what we'd done before. Don't go out and buy one though. It doesn't help feed my cats.

Meeting Andy Summers again

2017

You'd think we're buddies since he appears twice in this photo album. He stopped by to check out the Echoplex pedal I came up with and he loved it and he had to obtain one. He had a tour coming up really soon so when I got home I had a prototype cobbled together and tested by me to send to him. I was honored by his interest in it since he was kinda known for his use of the Echoplex back in the day. We left quite a legacy behind but to this day I can't understand why we had to leave it all behind.

That's Joe Perry!

2017

We got to meet him after a soundcheck. He was using four of my designs on his pedalboard! I remember pointing at his pedalboard and saying, "All those pedals you're using? Those are all my fault!" He replied, "Hey man, thanks for making the old, classic sounds even better and more reliable." I don't know what he's using these days. Like I was saying, I wish I could've stayed in touch with all these musicians. The implosion and bullshit lawsuit against me sort of stalled all the momentum I had. Since then it feels like I've been starting over, over and over again. Like I'm saying though — third time's a charm! 😎🤘

The kittycasterFX years

2018-2024

After the Catalinbread implosion the entire team was out and everyone had to scramble to figure out what was next. Four of us though were greeted with legal threats that eventually mounted into a full-on lawsuit against us; probably me in particular. It was all bullshit; I just wanted away from the hell that was that place and to be free to figure out how to start over. But the years 2018 through 2019, those two years, were occupied with defending against the legal BS. Finally, they moved to settle the case since it turned out like we told them that the stuff they claimed was "stolen" was in their possession the whole time. I learned firsthand what it feels like to have the legal system weaponized against me. Not cool and not fun. But finally we were able to start again and the kittycasterFX era began. I worked so hard to try to build a brand new brand. I learned how to design an enclosure by myself and I learned how to prototype with 3D printing by myself — that's what I was doing while stuck at home during covid. I came up with three pedals that I'm super proud of but that arrangement wasn't meant to be. Out on my own again in November of 2024, I immediately began to work on building yet another new brand but this time extremely lean and mean. This time I'm doing it by myself and with an extremely shoestring budget. As I write this I'm still several weeks from launch and I hope my remaining funds don't run out. If you're reading this, thank you for being here with me 💜💛❤️.

Polly & Miles

2023

I didn't intend for this photo album to be mostly NAMM photos, but like I said, 95% of my photos are cat pics. I lost my best friends Maya (2021) and Buddy (2023) and in August of 2023 I got these two little troublemakers and I named them Polly and Miles. They're siblings and they are going to help me run Mayasonic. Wish me luck with that!

NAMM 2017

This video was from the last time I ever went to NAMM. We were here to launch some echo unit and a couple other of my designs.

It's crazy to think that was years ago now.

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