Vintage Shin-ei UNIVIBE Uni-Vibe Pedal / Hendrix – Pink Floyd = in a Box..

We are Eclectic Sounds / aka: eclsounds – a store front in Portland, Or. We are open 7 days a week from 11 – 5 PST (by appointment)

 

In very good condition considering its age.

 

What was the original Uni-Vibe exactly? A vibrato pedal? Leslie simulator? Chorus? Phaser? Well, yes, sort of.

To hear a beautiful example of the Uni-Vibe in action, listen to David Gilmour’s guitar on Pink Floyd’s “Breathe.” You can also hear Jimi Hendrix playing through the effect on “Machine Gun” from Band of Gypsys.

The original Uni-Vibe pedal was created by the Japanese guitar effects company Shin-ei in the 1960s as an attempt to emulate the sound of a rotating Leslie speaker. Although you’re not likely to mistake the sound of a Uni-Vibe for a Leslie, it can produce some wonderful phase shifting effects.

So why is it so hard to pin down exactly what this effect is? The original pedal had a Chorus/Vibrato selector switch, and to this day you may see the pedal referred to as a chorus/vibrato pedal. However, it doesn’t really sound like a chorus pedal. Internally, a series of phasing filters were used, and in Chorus mode, the dry signal is mixed with the phase-shifted signal, producing the unique phase shifting sounds the pedal is most known for. In Vibrato mode, there is no dry signal present, resulting in a throbbing pitch bend (vibrato) effect.