Korg Nuvibe Vibrato Chorus Effector

The Uni-Vibe is an iconic effect, whether coming from Hendrix and Band of Gypsy’s “Machine Gun,” Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs” or multiple tracks from “Dark Side of the Moon” from Pink Floyd, you’ve heard it before many times, and chances are you dig it. Today’s pedal seeks to re-create those iconic effects units of the past, with a couple new enhancements as well. The Nuvibe from Korg is a vibrato and chorus, with simple controls that yield a wide array of tonal variety.

The Nuvibe brings you all that you know and love about the Uni-Vibe into play, but has a couple of new tricks up its sleeve. In addition to the Volume (main output level), Intensity (presence of the effect) and Speed (rate of the LFO), they’ve added in a new waveform section, with 10 sliders to help shift and shape your vibrato and chorus tones. There are little white marks strategically placed for each of these sliders, and setting them all to these marks gives you the original Uni-Vibe tone. The fun really comes when you want to experiment, diving right in and adjusting each one to taste to get the exact sound you’re after.

The Nuvibe was created under the supervision of one of the original Uni-Vibe developers, Fumio Mieda, for an extremely accurate re-creation. This beast uses 79 transistors internally, delivering sounds authentic to the original CdS photoresistor. The included expression pedal allows you to adjust the rate on the fly, hands-free, for tempo setting no matter how fast or slow you’re playing. New rhythmic modulations are just waiting to be unleashed onto your crowd, your next recording session or when you’re just having a jam with some friends.

Besides the aforementioned, other users include Trey Anastasio, Mike McCready, Steven Wilson, even Black Sabbath, and many, many more. What’s great about this type of effect is that you can use just a hint of it to color your sound ever so slightly, or crank it and get into crazy, spaceship blast-off warble territory with ease. Another one of these similar pedals we reviewed is the Vibe-Bro from Shin-ei, please feel free to check out that review and demo video as well!