A pedal bench in a punk house, and a phone number.

4ms did not start in Portland, and it did not start as 4ms. The company’s own history says Dan Green founded an effects-pedal business called 3MS Pedals near Chicago in 1996. Green dates his beginnings a little earlier: he told Sound On Sound in October 2026 that he started making guitar effects for himself in high school in 1993, and that the name was short for “3 Mad Sheep,” part of his high-school phone number spelled out. We give both dates, since the company and its founder count from different starting points.

The early operation was, in Green’s word, “scrappy”: he and friends worked out of the garage of a local anarchist-punk house, and travellers who crashed on the couch were sometimes taught to solder pedals to earn some cash. The pedals had many knobs, custom artwork and modifications made to order. Two years in, the company says, Green moved to St. Louis, Missouri, and began making table-top noise devices as well as pedals for experimental musicians.

The name changed in 2002. Green told Sound On Sound that “3M Company sent us a letter regarding the name resemblance, and after some back-and-forth we agreed to change our name to 4MS Company.” An archived version of the old website, captured in 2002 and 2003, announced the switch with “We’re one up!” and explained that the legal entity was 4ms Company, trading as 4ms Pedals.

From effects pedals to clocks, resonators and code.

That archived site describes a business built on sharing. Its pedals were “made by hand in pleasant working conditions by workers in the commonsound collective,” which it called a non-profit group of effects designers, and it said most were made in St. Louis, South Australia and Tennessee; it offered DIY kits, barter and factory seconds, and free repairs for life for original owners. A sister label, Soundshimmer, had made the Noise Swash, Triwave Picogenerator and Atoner before they were folded into 4ms. The company’s most ambitious pedal-era instrument was the Bend Matrix, which it describes as a 4×8 dynamic routing matrix, automatic circuit-bender and octophonic mixer.

Modular came next. In 2009 the company moved to Austin, Texas, and began designing Eurorack modules. Green told Sound On Sound that customers had been asking for all-in-one boxes with patch points, and that a sales contact at Big City Music lent the company an Analogue Systems rack: “It clicked instantly,” he said, adding that 4ms has not released an effects pedal since. The pedals are now listed as discontinued.

The modules became the brand. Sound On Sound wrote in 2018 that the Rotating Clock Divider and Shuffling Clock Multiplier were probably its best known, and its catalogue grew to include the Spectral Multiband Resonator, the Dual Looping Delay and the Stereo Triggered Sampler. Several designs were collaborations: the magazine reported that the Tapographic Delay (2018) and Ensemble Oscillator (2020) were developed with the Paris-based programmer Matthias Puech, and that the Catalyst modules of 2024 were based on a design from Emblematic Systems. The company says it won Electronic Musician’s Module of the Year in 2016 and 2017, which we could not confirm independently. Openness is part of the identity: Green told the magazine that schematics, board layouts and parts lists have been published “from the early days,” and the company says many designs are open-source.

The Eurorack format and its makers.

Eurorack is a modular synthesizer format that English Wikipedia says was originally specified in 1995 by Doepfer Musikelektronik, Dieter Döpfer’s company at Gräfelfing in Upper Bavaria; Doepfer’s own timeline dates the first A-100 modules to 1996, and the company now says it receives ready-built modules from outside manufacturers, doing only final testing in-house. Other makers began building to Doepfer’s published specification in the mid-2000s, and by 2022, Wikipedia says, citing ModularGrid, more than 600 manufacturers offered over 15,000 modules.

The seven makers in this guide span that history. Tiptop Audio, which Wikipedia lists among the format’s mid-2000s adopters, says it has “joined forces” with Buchla to resume production of the Buchla 200 series, and its founder, Gur Milstein, told Sound On Sound in 2024 that he had built a factory in Thailand that makes all its products. 4ms Company says Dan Green founded it as a pedal business near Chicago in 1996, began designing Eurorack modules in Austin in 2009 and moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2012.

Intellijel is Canadian — “made with love by robots in Canada,” its website says — and Sound On Sound credits it with its own widely adopted 1U format. Noise Engineering, owned by the husband-and-wife team Stephen McCaul and Kris Kaiser, says its products are “designed and built in Southern California.” XAOC Devices described its team in 2021 as based in the suburbs of Warsaw; its manuals say “Made in the European Union.”

Mutable Instruments, Émilie Gillet’s company, worked from a Paris workshop and had its modules made in Normandy, its website said, until it shut down in December 2022. In the sources we checked, we found no record of any of the others being sold to an outside owner.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A workshop on the Willamette.

In 2012 the company moved to Portland, Oregon, which it calls the West Coast nexus of synthesizer makers. It says its workshop is beside the Willamette River in northeast Portland, where it assembles modules, designs circuits and makes music, and that “all our products are built and tested by hand”; we give that as the company’s claim. Green told Sound On Sound in 2026 that 4ms now has seven people, about half in design and half in operations and production. Its staff page names Green as owner, engineer and designer, and we found no record of an outside owner or acquisition in the sources we checked. Green has taught modular synthesis at Portland Community College, the company says.

Its recent work bridges hardware and software. The MetaModule, which the company says “puts real knobs and jacks on virtual software modules,” runs patches ported from the free VCV Rack software; Sound On Sound, reviewing it in January 2026, liked its adaptability but found editing through a single encoder slow. The Leveling EQ Amplifier, or LEQA, came from employee Ross Fish, Green said, and its name is a nod to the LA-2A compressor; the magazine’s review said its EQ is based on the Neve 1073. The company also sells a simpler Looping Delay and Sampler, each fully built or as a beginner’s through-hole kit, plus power supplies and Pods cases.

For a design guide, 4ms shows how a brand can grow from a hand-made, open, community workshop into a respected instrument maker without losing that character. Compare Make Noise, another American Eurorack maker, and Buchla, the West Coast pioneer whose Buchla & Friends event Green named among the scene’s highlights. For this guide we use panel black, a deep green and solder gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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