Uni-Vibe

Open one up and the first surprise is a light bulb. It pulses, slowly or quickly, depending on where your foot has the speed pedal. Around it sit four light sensors, each running one of four stages of phasing, and the whole lot is shut inside a square box of bent aluminum, a light shield with a reflective inside.

As the bulb brightens and dims, the sensors push the guitar’s signal in and out of phase with itself, four stages deep. The tone swells and swims. There are transistors in there but no op-amps. It’s a shift-the-phase circuit driven by a lamp.

It has two modes. Vibrato is the wet signal on its own, the whole note wobbling. Chorus mixes your dry guitar back in underneath, and that’s the one people mean when they say “Uni-Vibe.”

The man behind it was Fumio Mieda, a Japanese engineer whose first effect of his own was a thing called the Psychedelic Machine. The Uni-Vibe, he said, was its sequel “with the fuzz function removed.” He was chasing one idea: “At that time, I was madly enthusiastic about discovering what kind of effect would be created by phases.”

What it was meant to sound like depends who you ask. The common story is a Leslie rotating speaker, the spinning cabinet organ players used, and some tell it as a keyboard effect first. Mieda’s own account is stranger: radio signals, Radio Moscow among them, wavering under atmospheric modulation. Both stories are still around. Mieda went on to spend 55 years at Korg, where he’s known as the father of the MS-20.

Who made the Uni-Vibe is a short question with a long answer. Mieda designed it. Honey built it first, as the Vibra-Chorus. It was renamed Uni-Vibe, gained the speed foot pedal and an easier way to get at the fuse, and in North America the distributor Unicord sold it under its Univox brand. By one account Unicord gave it the name. It didn’t design it.

When that happened depends on the telling. The usual date is 1968. Another version has Honey going bankrupt in March 1969, and Shin-ei taking over and building the pedal as the Uni-Vibe until around 1970, which makes the name a 1969 thing. Elsewhere it wore other badges: the Jax Vibra-Chorus, the Shin-ei Resly Machine, the Nomad Verberola.

It didn’t stay a Japanese curiosity. Boutique recreations brought it back in the early 1990s, and today “Uni-Vibe” is a Dunlop trademark. None of those are the box Trower found at Manny’s.

Jimi Hendrix had one at Woodstock on 18 August 1969. Back in Japan, Mieda didn’t find out for a long time: “I learned about Jimi Hendrix’s use of the Uni-Vibe at Woodstock about 10 years later.”

On 1 January 1970, Hendrix took the Band of Gypsys onto the stage at the Fillmore East with a Stratocaster and a new combination of effects: a Uni-Vibe, an Octavia, a Fuzz Face, and a wah. Those shows gave the world “Machine Gun,” released on Band of Gypsys on 25 March 1970.

Put it on and listen to the long, held notes. Under the fuzz and the feedback, the sound keeps moving, rising and falling like something breathing. That throb is the bulb.

Hendrix died that September. A few years on, the box turned up somewhere much calmer: David Gilmour ran his electric guitar through one on “Breathe,” on The Dark Side of the Moon.

Trower’s first time on record with it was probably “Song for a Dreamer,” on Procol Harum’s Broken Barricades in 1971, his tribute to Hendrix after his death. Asked if that was the first, he hedged: “I think it probably was.”

Then he went solo. Bridge of Sighs came out on 20 April 1974, made at AIR Studios with Geoff Emerick engineering and Matthew Fisher producing. The rig was small: a new Strat, two 100-watt Marshall heads into two 4×10 slant cabinets, a volume-boost pedal a friend built for him, a Cry Baby wah. And one more box: “I also had a Univibe,” Trower says, “which is the ‘Bridge of Sighs sound.’”

He thinks the title track is the most potent thing he’s ever made. Of Hendrix, he’s clear-eyed:

I think he influenced me a lot, but I do feel like I went on to make something of my own out of it.

Put on “Bridge of Sighs” and hear what he means. It’s slow and heavy, with the guitar swaying on the bulb’s pulse. He walked into Manny’s and heard Hendrix. Ask him about the Uni-Vibe now and he calls it by the name of his own record.