[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING A GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP ROTOVIBE ENGAGED]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Hi everyone. This is Owen O'Malley with Gearwire.Com, and I'm here with my friend Rotovibe, which is a pedal by Dunlop. The Rotovibe has been on the market for years and years now. It was designed to emulate the swirling effects, the Doppler effects of the Leslie cabinet, which was actually originally designed to work with the Hammond B3 organ. The basic concept behind the Leslie cabinet was a rotating speaker horn that had two microphones, so it was a stereo effect, and when the speaker would rotate, it would actually create a Doppler effect similar to what happens when an ambulance drives by, so there would be an increase in pitch as the speaker was getting close to one of the mics and a decrease in pitch as it was traveling away from the microphone. So, this pedal tries to sort of recapture the basic idea behind the Leslie cabinet.

It's a mono effect so it's sort of emulating the effect more than recreating it, and it does that by taking tones and bending them in pitch against one another to sort of simulate that sort of stereo Doppler effect. So, I'm going to demonstrate that for you here. It works just like a Crybaby. It's got a little, you know, it's got a rocker switch. This switch controls the speed of the effect, and you engage it by pressing hard down on the top of it with the edge of your foot.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING A GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP ROTOVIBE ENGAGED]

You can hear that sort of like real swishy swirl. It actually gets -- It's pretty close to the Leslie effect popularized on guitar by Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in the 60s. I won't try to emulate either of those. So this actually -- So here you can see the rocker switch change the speed of the effect. There's another little dial here that changes the depth of the effect from sort of very, very subtle all the way back...

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING A GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP ROTOVIBE ENGAGED]

...that's almost completely off actually to so extreme it's almost all effect. It's I don't know where you could it but it's pretty cool. And this has this one of those little sort of like MXR-style rubber grip so you can actually change this with your feet if you've been practicing your tree pose.

There's another switch here that switches between a vibrato effect, which is basically just a one-note pitch. It just takes one of the generated pitches out of the signal, creates just a real nice subtle vibrato effect.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING A GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP ROTOVIBE ENGAGED, VIBRATO MODE]

You'll notice these two little LEDs on the front. The red one indicates that you're on the vibrato effect, and the green LED over here indicates that the Leslie effect is on, and they also blink in correspondence with the rate of the effect. There you have it. That's the Dunlop Rotovibe.