From a custom service to a Portland workshop.

Catalinbread’s own account of its beginnings is short. Its website says the company was “born in 2003 on Nic Harris’s kitchen table,” as the Pacific Northwest’s answer to the boom in small, independent effects makers that the internet made possible. There is no Wikipedia article on the company, and we found no independent history of its founding, so the dates and names here rest mainly on the company’s own pages and on archived copies of them.

Those archived pages add a step before 2003. A copy of catalinbread.com saved by the Internet Archive in August 2004 shows a site called Catalin Audio, a one-person service offering custom-built effects, modifications to guitars and pedals, and restorations; “I work directly with customers,” it says. A news entry on that page dated 14 March 2002 announces the new website, then hosted on Geocities, and the text sets the service against makers who “clone a TS808” and sell identical boxes. Catalinbread’s 2003 date is best read as the start of the branded pedal line, not the first work under the Catalin name.

The company says its first Catalinbread-branded pedal was the Super Chili Picoso, made exclusively for ToneFactor, which it describes as a Seattle guitar shop; the sales of that pedal, which it calls “fur-lined,” paid for more ambitious designs. An archived “About Us” page from December 2007 lists “Nicholas” as president, founder and product designer and mentions “our former Seattle crew,” which fits the company’s account that it outgrew its first workshop and moved south. The company says it has been in Portland, Oregon, since 2006.

Vintage circuits, re-engineered.

Catalinbread’s catalogue is built largely on reinterpretations of classic equipment, and the company is open about its sources. Its Belle Epoch is described as inspired by the Maestro Echoplex EP-3 tape echo, in a maintenance-free pedal; its Echorec is presented as a stompbox version of the Binson Echorec multi-head drum echo, adding the variable delay time that the original’s fixed heads lacked. The Dirty Little Secret aims at the sound of late-1960s and early-1970s Marshall stacks and anchors what the company calls its Foundation overdrive series; the Formula pedals carry Fender circuit codes such as 5F6 in their names, and the Fuzzrite revisits the Mosrite fuzz. None of these product pages says the designs are licensed, and we do not suggest they are.

Some pedals have gathered endorsements the company repeats. Catalinbread says Brian May told Guitar World that its Galileo was the one stompbox able to match his signature sound, while stressing that the pedal was not designed with him; in 2024 it issued a “Red Special” colourway named after his guitar. It also quotes Eric Johnson calling the Belle Epoch the closest thing to a real EP-3 he had played. We have not checked either quotation at its original source.

Collaborations reach beyond homage. A product listing on Catalinbread’s store, posted in 2020, describes a limited 40th-anniversary edition of the Japanese maker Maxon’s OD808 overdrive carrying Catalinbread’s “ODin808” modification, in 400 numbered units; that text names Catalinbread’s chief engineer as Nicholas Kula. Its Knight School range, sold as do-it-yourself kits or as built pedals, began, the company says, as a teaching circuit for a local pedal-building class run by an amp technician. Premier Guitar reviewed the Airstrip, a preamp pedal modelled on the Trident A-Range recording console, in April 2025, at a street price of $179.

Design and documentation.

Guitar effects pedals have supported a long line of specialist American makers, from companies founded in the 1970s to one-person workshops that grew into brands. All seven makers in this group are based in the United States.

The oldest is MXR, co-founded in Rochester, New York, in 1972 by Keith Barr and Terry Sherwood, according to English Wikipedia; Jim Dunlop acquired the brand in 1987, and his company, Dunlop Manufacturing, is based in Benicia, California. Fulltone, founded by Mike Fuller in California in 1991, closed its Culver City workshop in 2022 and relaunched in 2024 with the pedal maker Jackson Audio handling manufacturing and distribution, Guitar.com reported; its website now gives an address in Keller, Texas.

Xotic says it began in 1996 in a garage in California’s San Fernando Valley, that its brand has been owned since 2000 by Prosound Communications, and that it now works from Van Nuys. Catalinbread says it began in 2003 on Nic Harris’s kitchen table and has been in Portland, Oregon, since 2006.

Death By Audio was founded in 2002 by Oliver Ackermann in a Brooklyn warehouse, according to English Wikipedia, and it says it now hand-makes its pedals in a warehouse in Queens. Wampler Pedals, which English Wikipedia places in Martinsville, Indiana, was founded by Brian Wampler in 2007. ZVEX, Zachary Vex’s company, is based in Minneapolis.

Much of what is said about where these pedals are made comes from the companies themselves.

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 Portland workshop, by its own account.

On ownership, the record is thin. Catalinbread’s website does not describe its owners or any change of control, and in the sources we could check — the company’s current and archived pages, Wikipedia and coverage in Premier Guitar — we found no report of a sale or acquisition. That is an absence in those sources, not proof that none has happened, so we describe Catalinbread simply as a Portland company and do not label it independent or family-owned.

Where the pedals are made is likewise stated by the company rather than documented by others. It says it has been in Portland since 2006, “now manufacturing over 30 unique pedals, built by human hands, one by one.” Its 2020 announcement of the Blood Donor, a reworked Katzenkönig fuzz whose profits it pledged to the American Red Cross during the coronavirus blood shortage, carries a Portland, Oregon, dateline. Recent releases show a small company working in limited runs: the Proto Club, launched in July 2025 according to an announcement carried by Premier Guitar, sells short-run pedals from its engineers’ breadboard experiments for two weeks at a time, beginning with the Tritone; the Belle Epoch + of November 2025 added tap tempo to the company’s tape-echo design.

The company also publishes a long-running blog of short histories of vintage effects, from the Binson Echorec and the Univox Uni-Fuzz to pedals by Maxon and MXR, which reads as a public notebook of the circuits it studies.

For a design guide, Catalinbread shows how a small maker can build a recognisable catalogue out of clearly labelled tributes to older equipment. Compare Strymon, another maker of delay and reverb pedals, and Walrus Audio, another American pedal house. For this guide we use forest green, tweed, cream and a rust red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Catalinbread’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.