Fulltone Deja’Vibe: The Real Uni-Vibe, Rebuilt Properly

There is a sound that arrives about ninety seconds into “Bridge of Sighs” and never quite leaves you. It is not a phaser. It is not a chorus. It is not a tremolo, although at speed it does something that behaves like one. It wobbles the pitch slightly, smears the midrange, and makes a Stratocaster sound like it is being played underwater by somebody having a very good time. Robin Trower built a career on it. Jimi Hendrix played it at Woodstock. David Gilmour used it to make “Breathe” feel like it was breathing.

The box responsible was a Japanese oddity built between late 1968 and 1972, and it was a commercial failure that only became legendary after the people who bought one found out what it actually did. Originals now change hands around the four-thousand-dollar mark and no two of them sound the same, because they were never consistent to begin with.

Michael Fuller has been rebuilding that circuit for longer than almost anyone, and the Deja’Vibe is the result. It is also — and this is the part nobody warns you about — a family of at least ten different products sold under six overlapping names across three decades, with a power-supply requirement that reversed itself somewhere in the middle. Buy the wrong one, plug in the wrong adapter, and Fulltone’s own manual says you may set fire to it.

So this is not a review. It is the map: what a Uni-Vibe actually is, what Fuller genuinely did differently, which Deja’Vibe is which, which players are documented on one and which are just names on a brand page, what the pedal does badly, and what to pay in 2026.

What a Uni-Vibe Actually Is

Most pedals sold as “vibes” are phasers with a marketing department. Understanding why the real thing is different is the whole basis of the Deja’Vibe’s existence, so it is worth thirty seconds.

The circuit was designed by the Japanese engineer Fumio Mieda in the mid 1960s and first sold in Japan around 1967 as the Honey Vibra Chorus, a device meant to fake a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet for organ players. When Honey collapsed, Shin-ei took the design over in 1968, added an external wah-style foot pedal to sweep the speed, and Univox distributed it in North America from 1968 onward under the name that stuck.

Technically it is a four-stage phase shifter, but the mechanism is unlike any op-amp phaser. Inside the housing sits a small incandescent light bulb surrounded by four photoresistors. The bulb pulses; the photocells change resistance as the light rises and falls; each of the four stages is tuned to a slightly different frequency, so instead of four notches sweeping in formation you get four notches sweeping out of formation. That asymmetry is the entire sound. It is why a Uni-Vibe throbs rather than swooshes, and why the pitch appears to bend.

Fuller’s own account of the history, printed in the Mini-Deja’Vibe manual and never removed, is characteristically blunt: the original was “an effects device made between late-1968 and 1972 designed to replicate a Leslie rotating speaker by using a tiny light bulb and four photo-resistors to help achieve its odd blend of pitch-bend vibrato and chorus-like Phase-Shifting. Although it didn’t much sound too like a Leslie, its watery sound took on a life of its own, and can be heard on many recordings ranging from Pink Floyd to Van Morrison.”

It failed at the job it was designed for and succeeded wildly at a job nobody had thought of. That is the honest version of the story, and Fuller tells it that way himself.

Why originals are unreliable

Two more lines from that manual explain why a clone industry exists at all. “Original Univibes” were large effects boxes mated to a separate wah-style foot-pedal via a five-pin quick-disconnect cable — bulky, awkward and easy to break. And: “Old ‘vibes were VERY inconsistent from one unit to the next and were prone to malfunctioning, with no one knowing how to fix them let alone how to make them sound good again.”

This is the same survivorship problem that haunts vintage wahs and vintage fuzzes. A bulb and four photocells are analogue components with wide tolerances, and their timing — how fast each cell reacts as the light comes up and goes down — varies as much as their resistance. Some units landed near the sweet spot and became famous. Most did not.

Fuller’s Route In

Fuller did not arrive at the Uni-Vibe as a designer looking for a product. He arrived as a repairman looking at a pile of broken ones. In his own words: “I started out in the ’80’s collecting, dealing, and repairing ‘vibes, which lead to the somewhat bright idea of re-designing and building a bullet-proof new ‘vibe clone in a smaller footprint.”

The brief he set himself has three parts, and all three still describe the product: a true-bypass vibe that was more reliable than an original, that could be tweaked by the owner to taste, and that cost roughly a quarter of what an original was fetching on the used market.

When did it start? Fulltone’s own documents disagree

Worth stating plainly rather than picking the tidiest answer. Fulltone’s current Mini-Deja’Vibe3 v2 page says: “I’ve been building ‘authentic vintage Univibe clones’ longer than anyone, since 1992.” Older company copy has been quoted as saying 1993. And the Mini-Deja’Vibe manual, carrying a 2003 copyright line, says “I have been making my Deja’Vibe… for over 15 years,” which back-dates the pedal to 1988 or earlier — before Fulltone was founded as a company around 1991.

The most likely explanation is mundane: the manual text was written later than its copyright line suggests and got retyped forward, a documented habit at this company. The honest summary is that Fuller was working on vibes in the late 1980s and selling the Deja’Vibe from the early 1990s, and that anyone quoting a precise founding year for this pedal is quoting one of at least three numbers Fulltone has published.

What is actually different inside

Fuller’s list of proprietary parts has stayed remarkably consistent across thirty years of documentation, which is itself a form of evidence. From the manuals and the current product pages:

• Custom photocells. Not off-the-shelf. Fuller states he took original 1960s cells and blueprinted them “not only their dark/bright resistance, but also for their all-important rise and fall times as they react to the light turning on and off.” That second parameter is the one nobody else specifies, and it is the one that governs the throb’s shape.
• A real incandescent bulb, glass-covered and hermetically sealed cells — four of them, as in the original.
• A mirror-finish lightbulb reflector shroud, custom-made, which is a detail that appears in no competitor’s spec sheet.
• NOS Panasonic/Matsushita 2SC828 transistors — the same part the original Uni-Vibes used.
• Thirteen discrete transistors and no op-amps in the audio path. Fuller’s stated test for whether a “vibe” is really a vibe: four sealed photocells plus a bulb on the board, 18 volts or more, and no ICs. His verdict on the alternative is not subtle — “the small ones are merely a glorified MXR phaser filled with opamps with a few capacitor changes. That’s not a Univibe!”
• Fulltone’s own geared dual speed potentiometer, made in-house with the correct value and taper, which he credits for the range of speeds the pedals reach.

The Version Map

This is the section most people actually need, because “Fulltone Deja Vibe” is not one pedal and the used market treats the names as interchangeable. The lineage below is assembled from Fulltone’s manuals, current product pages, and how the models are catalogued by retailers and aggregators. Where the evidence is thin, it says so.

Model	Format	Speed control	Notes
Deja’Vibe (original)	Large box	Oversized knob	The first generation. Big enclosure, big knob, mono.
Deja’Vibe / Mini Deja’Vibe (stereo era)	Smaller box, stereo variants	Knob	Stereo outputs offered; multiple sub-variants catalogued separately.
Deja’Vibe 2 (DV-2)	Large treadle	Built-in foot treadle	Restores the original’s foot-swept speed in one chassis.
Mini Deja’Vibe 2 (MDV-2)	Narrower treadle	Foot treadle	Same idea, smaller footprint; relay-based true bypass.
Mini-Deja’Vibe 3 (MDV-3)	Wah-sized treadle	Foot treadle	Manual © 2014. 9V in, internal doubler to 18V. Blue LED pulses to the rate.
CS-MDV-1 (Custom Shop Mini-Deja’Vibe)	Stompbox	Oversized knob + external pedal jack	The stompbox line that the mkII replaced.
CS-MDV mkII	Stompbox, 3.9″ × 4.1″ × 2.3″	Knob + expression jack	2018 redesign. 30% smaller. Native 18V. Current, $299.
CS-MDV-3 v2	Wah-sized treadle	Foot treadle	Current Custom Shop treadle. Native 18V. $399, limited run of 300 per year.

Two structural points that make the whole family legible:

First, the split is about your foot, not about the sound. Every Deja’Vibe runs the same circuit family. The real fork is whether speed is set by a knob (stompbox line: Mini-Deja’Vibe, CS-MDV-1, CS-MDV mkII) or swept live by a treadle (DV-2, MDV-2, MDV-3, MDV-3 v2). The treadle versions are the ones that behave like the original, where the tempo of the throb is a performance parameter rather than a setting. The stompbox versions take an expression pedal if you want that back.

Second, “mkII” and “v2” are the same generation, not a sequence. This trips people up constantly. Fulltone’s 2018 upgrade package — optocoupler-based speed control in place of the pot, a much wider speed range, a linear ramp, and a Class A JFET output stage giving up to 15dB of volume boost — was applied to the stompbox as the CS-MDV mkII and to the treadle pedal as the Mini-Deja’Vibe3 v2. The mkII is not older than the v2 and the v2 is not a replacement for the mkII. They are the same upgrade wearing two different shapes, and Fulltone sells both, today, at different prices.

What the 2018 upgrade actually fixed

Guitar World‘s Chris Gill reviewed the CS-MDV mkII in the magazine’s March 2019 issue and documented the change precisely: Fuller replaced the original potentiometers with a pair of custom-made Fulltone optocouplers with a range of 40 ohms to 5 megohms, which is what buys the extra speed at both ends. Street price at launch was $220.15.

Fuller’s own explanation of why is better than the spec: “This is the bummer about older Deja’Vibes, other clones, and original Univibes: the speed controller has a spot where everything happens, making it hard to find the right speed.” Anyone who has tried to set a vintage vibe to a musically useful rate knows exactly what he means — the useful range crowds into about twenty degrees of rotation and everything either side is unusable. The mkII and the v2 spread it out linearly across the whole sweep, including via an external pedal.

The other genuinely practical change is the expression jack. Fuller made the mkII’s external pedal input work with “virtually any expression pedal out there, whether it has a 10K, a 50K, 100K, etc potentiometer” — which, on a stompbox vibe, is the difference between owning a treadle you like and owning the one specific treadle the manufacturer intended.

Specifications

The two models Fulltone currently builds, side by side.

Specification	CS-MDV mkII (stompbox)	CS-MDV-3 v2 (treadle)
Price (Fulltone direct, Sept 2026)	$299.00 new	$399.00
Availability	In stock; B-stock sold out; 1–2 week lead time	Sold out; limited run of 300; returns Summer 2027
Speed control	Oversized knob + external expression jack	Foot treadle
Other controls	Volume, Intensity, Chorus/Vibrato, Modern/Vintage	Volume, Intensity, Chorus/Vibrato, Modern/Vintage
Footswitch	True bypass	Heel- or toe-activated true bypass
Dimensions	3.9″ W × 4.1″ L × 2.3″ H	Smaller than a standard wah
Power	18V DC (IPS-18 included direct), or 2 × 9V via series doubling cable	18V DC, min. 300mA (IPS-18 included), or 2 × 9V series
Audio path	13 discrete transistors, no ICs, full-size capacitors throughout	Fully discrete, no op-amps
Modulation engine	4 × hermetically sealed photocells + incandescent bulb	4 × hermetically sealed photocells + incandescent bulb
Speed element	Fulltone custom photoresistor, linear ramp	2 × Fulltone custom optocouplers
Output stage	Class A JFET, up to 15dB boost; very low output impedance	Up to 15dB adjustable boost
Finish	Custom Shop, top-mounted jacks	Hammertone Blue, white lettering, blue pulsing LED
Warranty	Limited 5 years to the original owner, proof of purchase, authorised dealer

The Power Supply Trap

This is the single most important thing in this article, it is not obvious from any current web page, and getting it wrong can destroy the pedal.

Older Deja’Vibes take 9 volts. Current ones take 18. They are not interchangeable, and the older manual’s warning is in bold with an exclamation mark.

The MDV-3 manual, © 2014, states that the pedal ships with Fulltone’s FPS-1 regulated 9VDC wall-wart, that you may only use a 9V adapter with a 2.1mm × 5.5mm centre-negative barrel, and then this, verbatim: “Warning! Do not use any voltage other than 9VDC. The MDV-3 has circuitry that converts the 9 volts up to 18 volts inside the pedal, using other than 9VDC will damage or destroy your pedal and may cause a fire!“

The same warning, word for word, appears in the older Mini-Deja’Vibe manual. Both generations of the DC-doubler pedals want exactly 9.0 regulated volts, because the bulb’s brightness — and therefore the entire character of the effect — depends on the supply being right. Fuller’s line: with an unregulated supply “the bulb will either be brighter or dimmer than is recommended and will not perform correctly.”

Now read Fulltone’s current pages. The CS-MDV mkII ships with the IPS-18 and is powered “with our 18 volt DC power supply… or by using 2 x 9VDC outlets on your pedalboard multi-power supply while using the Voodoo Lab PPY series voltage doubling cable.” The MDV-3 v2 wants 18V DC at a minimum of 300mA.

So a player who reads the current product page, buys a used MDV-3 from 2014, and feeds it 18 volts is following the manufacturer’s published instructions straight into the failure mode the manufacturer’s own manual warns about. There is no way to tell the two apart from a photograph.

The rule: if the pedal came with an FPS-1, it is a 9V pedal. If it came with an IPS-18, it is an 18V pedal. If you do not know, email Fulltone with the serial before you plug anything in.

There is a second-order consequence that shows up in owner discussion, and it is worth knowing before you shop the used market: players who have compared them report that the natively-18V versions have more volume and a richer sound than the 9V-with-doubler versions. That is consistent with the engineering — an internal doubler is working harder from a lower starting point — and it is one of the few clear reasons to prefer a newer unit on tone grounds rather than convenience grounds.

The Controls, and Which Way They Turn

The control set has barely changed in twenty-five years, which makes the manuals useful across the whole family.

Intensity

Not a wet/dry mix. Fuller: it “controls the amount of effect (chorus and Vibrato) by increasing (clockwise) or decreasing (counter-clockwise) the brilliance of the light source circuitry.” You are dimming a light bulb. The manual adds a practical instruction that most owners never read: reduce Intensity as you increase speed. At fast rates a fully-open Intensity setting turns the effect into a wobble that fights the note; backing it off keeps the throb musical.

Volume

Affects output only when the pedal is on — it is a level-match and, on the current models, a boost of up to 15dB. Fuller’s argument for the extra range: a vibe that drops your level when you engage it gets buried in a band, and “twice the available volume as any vibe clone” is the mkII’s stated fix. Use it. Set it by ear against bypass with the band playing, not alone in a bedroom.

Speed (knob or treadle)

On the treadle models the rubber pad is the speed control and the position sets the rate, exactly as on an original. On the stompbox models the oversized knob exists specifically so you can nudge it with a foot mid-song. The status LED pulses at the selected rate on every version, which is genuinely useful for syncing to a drummer before you kick it in.

Chorus / Vibrato

Set to Vibrato and you get out-of-tune pitch-bend with no phasing — the dry signal is removed. Set to Chorus and you get “the familiar Hendrix/Trower phasing sounds that we all grew up with,” which is the setting almost everybody leaves it on. Vibrato is the one people forget exists; it is the sound of a slightly seasick Leslie and it is superb on clean arpeggios.

Modern / Vintage

Fuller: Vintage is “stock, warm Univibe sounds of a darker nature”; Modern gives “more output and brightness… great when playing less distorted, cleaner sounds!” Owners comparing the Fulltone against DryBell’s Vibe Machine have identified the mechanism more specifically — Fulltone’s Vintage setting appears to carry a midrange boost, and Modern is the flatter of the two. Treat that as a well-informed community observation rather than a Fulltone spec, but it matches what the switch does in practice: Vintage sits the pedal forward in a mix, Modern keeps your amp’s own voice intact.

The Light Source Trimmer (internal)

The one adjustment Fulltone tells you not to touch, and the reason to read this section anyway: it is set at the factory per unit, and the optimal setting is physically marked on the pedal so you can get back to it.

Direction, because it is genuinely counter-intuitive: counter-clockwise INCREASES bulb brightness and increases the phase swoosh; clockwise DECREASES it. On the MDV-3 the trimmer sits under the bottom plate, reached by removing the four screws that hold the rubber feet, with the factory setting marked on the trimmer itself. On the older Mini-Deja’Vibe it is reachable through a hole in the base plate, with the factory mark scribed around the hole.

That per-unit factory marking is a useful used-buying signal, and it is the same habit Fuller applies to the resonance trimmer on the Clyde Deluxe Wah: someone listened to your specific pedal and wrote down where it sounded right. If the mark is there and the trimmer is on it, the pedal is at factory spec.

Treadle tension (treadle models)

A Nylok nut on the treadle axle sets how freely the pad moves — loosen for a lighter feel, tighten for more resistance. Fulltone’s warning is worth repeating because it is a real gigging failure: the nut must be tight enough that the treadle stays where you leave it. A treadle that sags under its own weight changes your modulation speed between songs while you are not looking at it.

Famous Players: Three Tiers

Fulltone’s current pitch names three artists: “Mine are used by Robin Trower, Peter Frampton, Doyle Bramhall II, and countless others.” Two of those three hold up under independent checking, one does not go beyond the brand page, and the most interesting names on the list are not on the list at all.

Tier 1 — documented in Fulltone’s own manual and corroborated elsewhere

Robin Trower. The flagship, and the claim is dated in Fulltone’s own paperwork rather than left vague. The MDV-3 manual, © 2014: “Trower only uses Fulltone Deja’Vibes since the day he tried one in 1994.” Independent aggregator records place him on both the Deja’Vibe 2 and the Mini Deja’Vibe 3. His signal chain choice is instructive too — he runs the vibe before his dirt, which is the opposite of the “modulation goes last” convention and the single biggest reason his vibe sounds like his vibe.

One honest caveat, applying the same test that any endorsement deserves: Premier Guitar‘s Rig Rundown with Trower, filmed at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works and published 28 March 2018 by John Bohlinger, lists his gear as a Boss TU-2, a Fulltone Full-Drive, a Fulltone WahFull and a Marshall 1987X. No Deja’Vibe appears in that published list. PG’s gear boxes are affiliate links rather than a full inventory and the video itself is described as showing off “the various Fulltone Pedals” in his rig, so this is weak evidence of absence rather than a contradiction — but a reader chasing recent-Trower should know that the one printed inventory of his touring rig does not name the pedal. The relationship is real, deep and thirty years old; the specific box on any given tour is a separate question.

Doyle Bramhall II. The best-documented sighting in the whole roster, and it comes with a recording attached. A 2008 touring-rig breakdown of both of his major gigs lists, for the Roger Waters In the Flesh tour, “a Fulltone Deja Vibe pedal (the gold colored model) — most notably heard on the solo for ‘Time’ from the In the Flesh DVD,” alongside a Dallas-Arbiter Fuzz Face, a Roger Mayer Octavia, a Hughes and Kettner Rotosphere, a Line 6 DL4, an Ibanez TS-9 and a Fulltone Clyde Deluxe wah. The same source lists a Deja’Vibe on his Eric Clapton touring board as well, so it is not a one-tour prop.

That is worth dwelling on, because it means the Deja’Vibe is the pedal used to play a Pink Floyd solo, on a Pink Floyd tour, alongside Snowy White and Andy Fairweather Low, by a left-handed Texan playing a right-handed Strat upside down. The evidence here is a specialist rig blog rather than a manufacturer or a magazine, which places it a notch below a filmed rundown — but it is specific, it names the finish, and it names the song.

Tier 2 — photo, video or specialist-source documented, not on Fulltone’s list

David Gilmour. The name Fulltone does not claim and probably could. Gilmour is recorded as having used a Fulltone Deja Vibe during the 2015 sessions for Rattle That Lock, sourced to Bjørn Riis at Gilmourish — the most rigorous Gilmour gear resource in existence and one that has no reason to flatter Fulltone, as we will see in a moment. It sits neatly inside his long Uni-Vibe history: he added an original in early 1972 for the Eclipse suite, used it on “Breathe” for Dark Side of the Moon, kept it on his boards from 1973 to 1977, and in 1994 had a custom rack version built which stayed in his rig for live performances of “Breathe” and “Time.”

Paul Gilbert. A Deja Vibe appears on his own Facebook photograph of a complete tour pedalboard published 28 March 2019, captioned “Ready for the tour!” — posted next to the main guitar for that run. Photographic, dated, artist-published: about as good as roster evidence gets.

Wes Borland is catalogued on a Deja Vibe, which is a pleasing outlier — the Limp Bizkit guitarist is not who this pedal’s marketing is aimed at, and a nu-metal player reaching for a 1968 Leslie simulator says something about the pedal’s range that the blues-rock roster does not.

Also documented at roster level: Marcus King and Will Fiore on the Mini Deja Vibe 3; Henrik Freischlader, whose pedalboard carries one as its vibe; Julián Saldarriaga of Love of Lesbian; and Dan Lebowitz of ALO, whose 2005 New York pedalboard photograph includes one. Two of those are European and South American players outside the American blues-rock circuit, which is a reasonable indicator that the pedal travelled on merit rather than on endorsement deals.

Tier 3 — brand page only

Peter Frampton. Named in Fulltone’s own copy and nowhere independently checkable in the sources consulted for this piece. That is not a reason to disbelieve it — Frampton is a lifelong talkbox-and-modulation player and the fit is obvious — but it is the weakest of the three names Fulltone puts forward, and it should be reported as such rather than laundered into a fact by repetition.

And the name that cannot be on the list

Jimi Hendrix never touched a Deja’Vibe. He died in September 1970, more than twenty years before Fuller sold one. Every Hendrix reference in Fulltone’s copy — and in this article — is about the circuit: the Shin-ei/Univox unit he played at Woodstock on 18 August 1969 and on “Machine Gun” from Band of Gypsys. The same applies to the “Bridge of Sighs” sound, recorded in 1974 on an original. The Deja’Vibe is a reconstruction of the machine those records were made on, which is a strong claim on its own and does not need to be dressed up as an endorsement.

A note on how this roster is scattered

One methodological finding worth passing on, because it will save you time. The major gear aggregators file the Deja’Vibe under at least ten separate product entries — Deja Vibe, Deja Vibe 2, Mini Deja Vibe, Mini Deja Vibe (2010), Mini DejaVibe MDV-1, Mini DejaVibe Stereo, MDV-2, Mini Deja Vibe 3, CS-MDV-1, CS-MDV mkII, CS-MDV-3 v2 — each with its own artist count. No single page shows more than a handful of names. Anyone who looks up “Fulltone Deja Vibe,” sees six artists and concludes the pedal is niche has read one-tenth of the record. Aggregate the entries and the roster runs to dozens.

The Honest Criticism

Fulltone’s marketing claim is that the Deja is the only exact replica of the original 1968 Uni-Vibe. The most credible independent assessment of that claim agrees with the premise and then declines to award the prize.

Bjørn Riis’s Gilmourish buyer’s guide — which tested a dozen vibes through a Stratocaster with vintage-output single coils into Reeves and Laney tube stacks, exactly the rig this pedal is built for — scores the Fulltone Mini DejáVibe at 7/10 overall. Its “Vintage UniVibe tones” sub-score is 9/10, so the authenticity claim survives. What drags the total down is everything else: “it doesn’t quite make it in my opinion. Perhaps it’s just too authentic, I don’t know, but to me it sounds a bit thin and it doesn’t blend as well with heavier overdrive and fuzz as some of the other clones listed here.” In the same guide, DryBell’s Vibe Machine, Electronic Orange’s MoonVibe MkII and the Effectrode Tube-Vibe all take 10/10.

That is a serious criticism from a serious source, and it should change how you shop. Note precisely what it says: not that the Deja’Vibe sounds wrong, but that it sounds right in a way that is harder to use. A faithful Uni-Vibe is a slightly lo-fi, midrange-shifting, volume-hungry device. Riis’s own general advice on the format is that “UniVibes need a bit of volume to really open up for that liquidy, swirling tone” and that at low levels or into a dark amp they “can sound muffled, thin and flat.”

Read together, the picture is coherent: the Deja’Vibe rewards a loud, clean, single-coil rig and punishes a bedroom setup with humbuckers and a lot of gain. If your reference is Trower into a cranked Marshall, that is the correct trade. If you want a vibe that flatters a modern high-gain board, several competitors are better at it and Riis names them.

Two smaller counterweights from the owner community, offered in the same spirit. The Deja’Vibe is repeatedly praised for not colouring the guitar’s tone the way some rivals do, and for producing a genuine harmonic-tremolo effect at high speeds that many clones cannot. And more than one long-term owner reports that it is very hard to make it sound bad. Both things can be true: a pedal can have a narrow ideal context and be excellent inside it.

Tone Recipes

Settings assume the current control set. Where a recipe calls for the vibe before your dirt, that is not a stylistic preference — it is how nearly every canonical vibe recording was made.

Where It Goes in the Chain

The single most common mistake with a Uni-Vibe is putting it where the pedalboard convention says modulation belongs, which is at the end.

Riis puts the case as clearly as anyone: “UniVibes tend to make heavier overdrives and fuzz sound harsh and thin, when these are placed in front of the UniVibe. Placing the UniVibe first, creates a warmer and more natural sounding effect.” Gilmour’s practice was a vibe into a clean amp with at most a mild overdrive; Trower runs his Deja’Vibe ahead of his dirt; Hendrix’s fuzz-first arrangement is the deliberate exception rather than the rule.

There is a second reason particular to this pedal. Fulltone specifies a “super-low output impedance so it is not affected by pedals that come after it,” which means the Deja’Vibe is unusually well-behaved driving whatever follows. That is an argument for first position that most vibes cannot make.

Two practical corollaries. Wahs and vibes can interact badly — some owners report having to keep the vibe first for exactly that reason, ahead of a Cry Baby or a Clyde. And guitar choice matters more than usual: Riis finds vibes sound most authentic with vintage-output single coils, and less convincing with humbuckers, which tracks with the fact that virtually every famous Uni-Vibe recording was made with a Stratocaster.

Deja’Vibe vs the Alternatives

The vibe market has more credible options now than at any point in its history, and honest comparison is easy because the category is unusually consistent — as Riis puts it, a Uni-Vibe clone is pretty much a Uni-Vibe, and the differences are nuances rather than genres.

Against the other real photocell vibes

DryBell Vibe Machine V-2 / V-3 is the most frequently named alternative and Riis’s own current favourite — a four-photocell circuit in a genuinely small enclosure, with better behaviour into high gain and a slightly brighter, more defined voice than the Fulltone. It also has an Original/Bright switch that maps closely onto the Deja’Vibe’s Vintage/Modern pair, mid-boost and all. If you like the Fulltone concept but want it to sit in a modern board, this is the direct rival.

Effectrode Tube-Vibe puts a valve preamp stage in front of the same idea. Warmest and most dynamic of the lot, with headroom to boost the amp, but it cannot do the deep high-speed tremolo sounds and it is large and expensive.

Electronic Orange MoonVibe MkII adds a Symmetry control that cleans up high-speed settings — the one thing a stock Uni-Vibe circuit does least well.

Against the phaser-based pretenders

Fuller’s objection to op-amp “vibes” is technically correct and practically overstated, which is worth saying out loud. A Phase 90 is not a Uni-Vibe and never will be — but a two-stage phaser like the MXR Phase 45, or the more flexible Phase 95, gets close enough for a great many songs, blends far more easily with heavy gain, and costs a fifth as much. The Boss PH-3 covers similar territory with more control. Anyone who wants vibe-adjacent movement rather than a specific historical sound should audition a phaser before spending $299.

The MXR M68 Uni-Vibe is the obvious budget comparison — based on the original Shin-ei, correct lo-fi throb, and Riis scores it 8/10, only a point behind the Fulltone. It is not as authentic and not as well built, and it is a third of the price.

Against the combination pedals

The Keeley Monterey bundles rotary, vibe, fuzz and octave into one enclosure aimed squarely at the same Hendrix repertoire, and for a player who wants the Woodstock sound in one box rather than three, it is a more efficient purchase. The Deja’Vibe is the better vibe; the Monterey is the better system.

The Dunlop Rotovibe is a treadle-swept hybrid of vibe and four-stage phaser. Riis is unusually generous about it — 9/10 as a modulation pedal, 6/10 as a Uni-Vibe — and for a player torn between formats it is the sensible compromise.

Against the other Fulltones

If you are assembling a Fulltone board, the Deja’Vibe is the one that goes first. Behind it, the Full-Drive 2 is the transparent mid-forward overdrive, the OCD is the amp-like one, the PlimSoul is the two-stage clipping specialist, and the Clyde Deluxe is the wah. That is very close to the rig Robin Trower has been playing for thirty years, which is presumably not a coincidence.

Buying Guide, September 2026

Current prices

Model	Price	Notes
CS-MDV mkII (new, Fulltone direct)	$299.00	In stock; 1–2 week lead time; IPS-18 included
CS-MDV mkII (aggregate street)	$254.15 – $333.00	Prices updated 1 September 2026
CS-MDV-3 v2 (new, Fulltone direct)	$399.00	Sold out; 300 units per year; back Summer 2027
Mini Deja Vibe 3 (aggregate)	$277.00 – $399.00
Deja Vibe (original, used)	from $245.00	Listed as vintage/discontinued; several available
Deja Vibe 2 (used)	$254.15 – $333.00
Mini DejaVibe MDV-1 (used)	around $206.00
Mini Deja Vibe / 2010 mono (used)	around $200.00	Cheapest route into the family
Mini DejaVibe Stereo (used)	around $299.99
Original Univox U-915 Uni-Vibe	around $4,000.00	For scale
Category average, all vibes	$381	The Deja’Vibe sits in the high-end/boutique tier

Which one should you buy?

If you want the sound and nothing else: a used Mini Deja’Vibe or MDV-1 at $200–$206 is the cheapest entry to a genuine four-photocell circuit, and it is roughly what a mid-tier digital vibe costs new. Confirm it takes 9V.

If you want the current pedal: the CS-MDV mkII at $299 is the one to buy, and not only because it is the one you can actually get. The linear speed ramp and the universal expression jack are real usability fixes, the 18V operation is the better-sounding architecture, and it is 30% smaller than the pedals it replaced.

If you want to sweep speed with your foot: the MDV-3 v2 at $399, and you will be waiting — Fulltone builds 300 a year, the current run is gone, and the next is scheduled for Summer 2027. A used MDV-3 or MDV-2 is the realistic alternative, with the 9V caveat attached in bold.

If you are not sure a Uni-Vibe is what you want: buy a phaser first. Genuinely. The number of players who buy a boutique vibe, discover they wanted subtle movement rather than a 1969 pitch-warble, and sell it within a year is not small — the used market’s steady supply is partly made of exactly those people.

Used-buying checklist

• Establish the voltage before anything else. FPS-1 in the box means 9V only. IPS-18 means 18V. No power supply and no serial-number check means do not plug it in.
• Watch the LED. It should pulse at the rate you have set, smoothly, with no stutter. The LED is your window onto the oscillator.
• Sweep the speed control across its full range with the amp on. On pre-2018 units, expect all the useful settings to be crowded into one part of the sweep — that is the design, not a fault. On mkII and v2 units, expect it to be linear; if it is not, something is wrong.
• Check the factory mark on the trimmer. If it is present and the trimmer is on it, nobody has been inside guessing.
• On treadle models, check the Nylok nut. Rock the treadle to the top of its travel and let go. It should stay.
• Listen for the bulb. An incandescent bulb is a consumable. If the effect is weak with Intensity maxed, that is the first suspect and it is a serviceable fault, not a dead pedal.

Living With One

The Deja’Vibe is a lightbulb, four photoresistors and thirteen transistors in a steel box. That is a service-friendly design in a way that a DSP pedal never can be: everything that wears out is a discrete part that a competent tech can replace, and the two things most likely to drift — bulb brightness and speed range — both have adjustments.

Fulltone’s warranty is a limited five years to the original owner with proof of purchase from an authorised dealer, covering manufacturing faults only. It is void if anyone other than Fulltone or an authorised repairer opens it up, and explicitly void for use of an incorrect power supply — which is the third time the power question has come up in this article and will not be the last time it costs someone money. Fulltone asks for email contact rather than phone calls for technical issues, and issues a return authorisation form before any repair.

The company address on the vibe manuals is 11018 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232, the same address printed on the Full-Drive 2 MOSFET and Clyde Deluxe manuals of the same era, which is a useful way of dating Fulltone paperwork: the Clyde Standard manual carries a Marina del Rey address and the 2001 Vintage Guitar review lists a third in Los Angeles.

One last note on the current company. Fulltone closed in 2022 and relaunched, and the Deja’Vibe survived that closure as a Custom Shop item — which is the strongest available statement about where the pedal sits in Fuller’s own priorities. Building 300 treadle vibes a year, by hand, with custom-blueprinted photocells and NOS Japanese transistors, is not a volume business. It is somebody keeping a thirty-year-old promise about a Japanese circuit from 1968.

Frequently Asked Questions