A hardware engineer, a DSP engineer and a designer.

Meris is a small Californian maker of digital effects pedals and 500-series studio modules. Its founder is Terry Burton, a hardware engineer who, by his own account to Guitar.com in February 2019, started out repairing gear for a local technician, then spent about seven years at Line 6, first as a technician and then as a design engineer working mostly on amplifiers. “Fast forward to 2013 and I was ready to start something new again,” he told the magazine; he contacted Angelo Mazzocco, a digital-signal-processing engineer he had met at Line 6, and “Meris was born.” English Wikipedia also gives 2013 as the founding year and names Burton as founder.

Burton described the division of labour plainly: “I’d design the hardware, Angelo would design the algorithms and Jinna would be responsible for the look and vibe of the brand and products.” Jinna Kim, his wife, is credited on the Meris website as creative director; it says she worked for Los Angeles design agencies with clients including Disney, Sony Pictures and General Motors. Mazzocco is listed as DSP engineer and vice president, and the website says he wrote DSP code and one-off instruments for players including Eddie Van Halen and The Edge while at Line 6. The company is Meris, LLC, and Burton said in 2019 that it had “always been self-funded”; we found no outside owner or acquisition.

The Strymon connection needs care. The Meris website calls Burton “previously the founder of Strymon,” and in the 2019 interview he said he and Jinna started Strymon in their apartment. Strymon tells it differently: a 2014 history on its own website says its parent, Damage Control Engineering, was founded by the engineers Gregg Stock, Pete Celi and Dave Fruehling, and that “now-departed colleague Terry Burton,” who had been working independently in their offices, “had created the Strymon trademark,” which the trio adopted in 2009. We give both accounts. The Meris website adds that Jinna Kim designed Strymon’s brand identity.

From a mic preamp to modular pedals.

Meris began in the studio rather than on the pedalboard. Its website announced on 22 January 2014 that it had unveiled its first product, the 440, a microphone preamp in the 500-series module format, which it called “the ultimate 500 Series Preamp for recording guitar.” The Ottobit, a bitcrusher module, followed by 2015, and archived pages from 2015 to 2017 advertised the hardware as “made in LA,” stressing transformers and premium components. The company’s home page today quotes Burton saying that Cinemag winds its transformers “at a little shop in northwest Los Angeles.”

Pedals came next. Burton named the Mercury7 reverb and the Ottobit Jr. as the first two. The Mercury7 took its cue from Vangelis’s Blade Runner soundtrack, and Premier Guitar’s September 2017 review, filed among its 2017 gear awards, called it “a highly potent musical instrument that can crack open whole galaxies of sound.” Guitar.com reviewed the Polymoon modulated delay in April 2018, and reported the launch of the Enzo synthesizer pedal in September 2018 and the Hedra pitch-shifting delay in May 2019. In February 2019 Burton said the Enzo, inspired by the Yamaha CS-80 and Oberheim synthesizers, was the best seller. At NAMM in January 2020, Meris and Chase Bliss announced a joint reverb, the CXM 1978, the Australian magazine Mixdown reported.

A second generation began with the LVX, a modular delay announced in May 2022, built around an ARM processor with 99 presets and a 60-second stereo looper, Guitar.com reported. The MercuryX reverb followed in October 2023 on the same modular architecture, which Meris called “the most flexible studio reverb ever created in a pedal format”; then came the Enzo X in February 2025 and the Ottobit X, a “modular degradation and texture engine” priced at $599, in June 2026, according to MusicRadar. Burton told that magazine the Ottobit X “took me back to the days of riding my BMX to pick out a VHS.”

Design and documentation.

The seven makers in this group are smaller pedal companies, some building analogue circuits by hand, some writing their own digital processing. Five are American, one Canadian and one English.

Analogman is Mike Piera’s workshop in Bethel, Connecticut, where the Connecticut Mirror reported in 2024 that he has worked full-time since about 2000. Source Audio says it was founded in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 2006; in July 2026 the companies announced that it had become part of Ernie Ball, the string maker.

Meris, which Terry Burton, formerly of Strymon, told Guitar.com he started in 2013, says its pedals are designed and built in California. Red Panda says it began in 2009 and assembles every pedal in its metro Detroit workshop. Old Blood Noise Endeavors lists a shop in Oklahoma City, and Guitar World reported in 2025 that its pedals are hand-made at its Oklahoma headquarters.

Fairfield Circuitry says it has worked since 2008 and does all its manufacturing in Hull, Québec. Origin Effects, founded by Simon Keats, says it hand-builds its pedals in Buckingham, England; the UK company register lists Keats as its controlling shareholder.

Apart from Source Audio, we found no record of an outside owner for any of these companies, and much of what is said about where their 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.

“Uniting Art & Engineering.”

On manufacturing, Meris has changed its wording over the years but has always pointed to California. Its pages said “made in LA” in 2015–2017 and “Made in the USA” by 2019; the footer now reads “Designed and Built in California, U.S.A.” We give those as the company’s claims. Location is a small trap of its own: English Wikipedia and the 2019 interview place the company in Los Angeles, but its own contact details have given an address in Ventura, up the coast, since at least February 2019 — the town where Burton said he lived when he joined Line 6.

The brand is largely the work of one designer. Burton told Guitar.com he had always been confident Jinna Kim would “nail it,” and the company’s motto, “More than Logic. Uniting Art & Engineering,” runs through its pages; Burton and Kim also host an art and engineering blog, 7 Electrons. In 2024 Meris marked ten years — counting from its 2014 launch — with a matte-black limited edition of the LVX and MercuryX, later extended to the Enzo X. We found no published brand guidelines, typeface or colour specification.

For a design guide, Meris shows how a small engineering company can let a single creative director shape everything from the product panel to the website. Compare Strymon, the Californian pedal maker whose trademark, Strymon says, Burton created, and Chase Bliss, its partner on the CXM 1978. For this guide we use matte black, studio silver and a muted blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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