Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl HiFi: The Pedal That Made a Ruined Record Sound Like a Virtue

Every guitarist has heard it. You put on a record that spent a summer afternoon leaning against a window, and the moment the needle drops, the pitch starts breathing. Not wobbling in a tidy, metronomic way — breathing, unevenly, the sustained notes swelling sharp and sagging flat as the platter rides its own topography. Most people call a warped record garbage. Joel Korte spent an entire year of his life turning it into a stompbox.

The Warped Vinyl HiFi is the third and final version of the pedal that started Chase Bliss Audio, and it is one of the strangest things in the modern modulation aisle: an all-analog vibrato and chorus built on a bucket-brigade delay chip, wrapped in more digital control than most rack processors had in 1985, and priced like a boutique overdrive with delusions of grandeur. It has two footswitches, six knobs, four toggles, sixteen dip switches, MIDI, CV, expression, presets, and a tap tempo. It is also, as of August 2024, discontinued — which changes how you should think about buying one, and we’ll get to exactly why.

This is not a review. This is a guide to what the thing actually does, who has actually been photographed using one, how to get sounds out of it that don’t make your bandmates flinch, and whether the used market is treating it fairly.

The Record Left in the Sun: Where Warped Vinyl Came From

Anoka, Minnesota, and a Pedal Named for a Brother

Chase Bliss Audio was founded in 2013 in Anoka, Minnesota, by Joel Korte. The name is not a marketing abstraction. Korte’s brother Chase Korte was killed in 2007 when his car was struck by a drunk driver; one of Chase’s favourite sayings was “follow your bliss.” The company name is both a memorial and an instruction, and if you’ve ever wondered why a pedal firm this small has been this stubborn about doing things the hard way, that’s a reasonable place to start looking.

Korte spent essentially the entire first year of the company’s existence developing one product. That product was Warped Vinyl, released in December 2013 — an analog vibrato with, in the phrase that would become the company’s tagline, a digital brain and an analog heart. The premise was that you shouldn’t have to choose between the sound of analog processing and the flexibility of digital control. Your guitar signal would stay analog from jack to jack, and every knob and switch would be read by a microcontroller so the pedal could do things — presets, ramping, MIDI, tap tempo — that analog stompboxes historically could not.

It was not obviously a commercial idea. A relatively expensive, deeply weird vibrato from an unknown builder in Minnesota is not the kind of thing a business plan recommends. It sold more than 500 units in its first year and put the company on the map.

Original (2013) → mkII (2015) → HiFi (2017)

The lineage is short and worth knowing, because all three versions turn up on the used market and they are not interchangeable.

The original Warped Vinyl (December 2013) hid its sixteen dip switches on the underside of the enclosure. To reconfigure it, you unbolted it from your board and flipped it over. This was, charitably, a design decision of its time.

The Warped Vinyl mkII was announced on 26 March 2015 alongside the Wombtone mkII phaser and the Gravitas tremolo, with a launch date of 23 April 2015 and a retail price of $349. The press release lists three substantive changes across the mkII line: the sixteen dip switches moved from the undercarriage to the side of the enclosure for visibility and access; every parameter became MIDI-controllable; and the pedals gained 122 MIDI-recallable analog presets on top of the two stored onboard. Each mkII also got what Korte called a “bonus” knob — drive on Gravitas, feed on Wombtone, and tone on Warped Vinyl. In Korte’s own framing at the time: “I think we have made some significant improvements.” The added tone control was aimed at everything from hi-fi chorus to shimmery pitch modulation, alongside a quieter circuit and a wider vibrato range.

The Warped Vinyl HiFi arrived in March 2017 at $379. It kept the mkII’s side-mounted dip switches and full digital control set, and added the change that genuinely reframes the pedal: a Lag knob. Chase Bliss’s own summary of the HiFi upgrades is short and honest — a lag knob for lush chorus tones, reduced noise, and the option of more transparent and brighter tones. That first item is the big one. Lag is what turns Warped Vinyl from a vibrato that can do a bit of chorus into a chorus pedal that happens to also be an outstanding vibrato.

What “True Pitch” Actually Means (And Why It Matters Here)

Chase Bliss market the Warped Vinyl as “true pitch” modulation, and it’s worth unpacking that phrase because it is doing real work rather than acting as ad copy.

The pedal creates its vibrato by copying your dry signal onto a 1024-stage bucket-brigade delay chip and then modulating that chip’s delay time. When you speed up or slow down the clock feeding a BBD, the audio coming out the far end is genuinely pitch-shifted — the same physical mechanism as a tape machine changing speed, or a record spinning eccentrically. It is not a filter sweep pretending to be pitch movement. That is the distinction “true pitch” is pointing at.

The side-effect is the reason people buy this pedal rather than a cleaner one. Because the wet signal has physically travelled through a bucket-brigade chip, it arrives carrying BBD character: warmth, a soft top end, compression, and a slice of touch-responsive noise. Chase Bliss describe that noise as part of the vinyl effect, and they are not being defensive — the grit is the point. A perfectly quiet, perfectly clean vibrato sounds like a plugin. This one sounds like a physical object with a groove worn in it.

From that single mechanism, the two classic modulation effects fall out naturally:

• Vibrato is what you get when Mix is at 100% wet. You hear only the pitch-modulated signal, so the pitch itself moves.
• Chorus is what you get when you blend wet and dry. The two signals interfere with each other, and the resulting comb filtering is what your ear reads as thickness and width.
• Lag is the control that decides how much interference. Pushing the wet and dry signals further apart in time spreads that comb filtering across more of the frequency spectrum, which exaggerates the chorus. Turn Lag up and the pedal moves from cozy shimmer to something genuinely lush and wide.

Understanding that chain — BBD clock modulation makes real pitch movement; Mix decides whether you hear the pitch or the interference; Lag decides how dramatic the interference is — is 80% of learning this pedal. Everything else is shaping.

Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl HiFi: Specifications

The Current-Draw Discrepancy — Read This Before You Plug It In

Two first-party Chase Bliss sources give two different current figures for this pedal. The printed instruction sheet that ships in the box states the pedal consumes roughly 70 mA. The current product page on Chase Bliss’s own site lists 9V centre negative, ~100 mA. Neither is a typo and both are official.

Our working recommendation: treat 100 mA as the number to design your power supply around, and give it an isolated output with headroom above that. The polarity and connector are the parts that are genuinely non-negotiable — 2.1 mm barrel, centre negative, the standard Boss-style arrangement. Note that this is the opposite convention to the Eventide Factor series (TimeFactor, Space, PitchFactor), which use 5.5/2.5 mm centre positive. If you run a mixed board, that is the single most expensive mistake available to you.

Chase Bliss are not subtle about the consequences. Their own FAQ, under “Why isn’t my pedal passing audio when I engage it?”, answers: “You fried it, probably got the wrong kind of power.” Wrong-polarity damage on this platform is a bench repair, not a fuse swap.

The Controls, One by One

RPM

Rate of the vibrato — named, obviously, for turntable speed. It can be overridden by the tap tempo footswitch, which is the fastest way to lock the pedal to a song rather than to a knob position.

Depth

How wide the pitch excursion goes. Chase Bliss note explicitly that the HiFi has a wider, crazier vibrato range than previous versions — cranked clockwise you get genuinely pitch-bending, seasick modulation, well past what a conventional chorus pedal will offer. Depth also sets the maximum sweep available when you’re driving the waveform directly from an expression pedal.

Warp

The most misunderstood knob on the pedal, and the most musical. Warp controls the centre point of the modulation — effectively the symmetry of the LFO. Counterclockwise, the wave ramps up quickly and falls away gradually. Clockwise, it rises gradually and drops off quickly. Straight up at noon gives you a perfectly symmetric wave, which is what every other modulation pedal on your board is permanently stuck at.

Asymmetry is what makes this sound like a mechanical fault rather than an oscillator. Real warped records don’t wobble symmetrically; they lurch.

Left and Right Wave Shape Toggles (ModuShape)

Here is the trick that no rival chorus pedal has. Warped Vinyl splits the waveform in half and lets you choose a different shape for each half. The left toggle sets the first half — left for sine, middle for triangle, right for square. The right toggle sets the second half — and note that its order is inverted: left for square, middle for triangle, right for sine.

Together with Depth and Warp, these two toggles make up what Chase Bliss call the ModuShape engine. In practice it means you can have a note swell gently upward on a sine curve and then get yanked back down by a square-wave edge, or ripple up and slope down, or any of the nine combinations. Asymmetrical pulsing and sloping ripples are the manufacturer’s own descriptions, and they’re accurate. This is the feature that justifies the price if any single feature does.

Tone (Ramp)

The manual calls this “a magical knob” and it earns the phrase by wearing two hats.

With no dip switches assigned to ramping, it’s a tone control for the wet signal only — it does not touch your dry signal at all, which is why you can blend a dark, vintage-sounding modulation underneath a bright dry guitar. Noon is transparent; clockwise shaves off lows; counterclockwise shaves off highs. It interacts heavily with Mix when you’re dialling chorus, so treat them as a pair.

Assign any parameter to ramping, and the same knob becomes the ramp time control. This is a Chase Bliss house behaviour — the Thermae does the same thing with its Mix knob — and it is the number-one source of “my pedal stopped responding to the tone knob” confusion. If Tone appears dead, check your dip switches.

Lag

The HiFi’s headline addition. Lag is the delay time between the wet and dry paths. Turn it clockwise and you increase that gap, which traditionally produces a lusher chorus. Two things to know: more Lag also means slightly more noise in the wet path, and if you’re running 100% wet for pure vibrato you almost certainly want Lag fully counterclockwise, so there’s no perceptible latency between your pick attack and the sound — and so the background noise is at its minimum.

Mix

100% wet, 100% dry, or anywhere between. Parked in the middle it introduces chorus. As above, dial it alongside Tone rather than in isolation.

Tap Division Toggle and Hold Mode

In normal mode the toggle selects tap divisions of 1, 2 or 4. A dip switch swaps that bank to 3, 6 and 8 — useful for triplet and dotted feels, and also the switch that selects MIDI note divisions. A separate dip switch enables Hold mode, at which point the toggle’s three positions become R / − / +:

• R — holding the left footswitch triggers a Ramp.
• − — holding momentarily deactivates the vibrato LFO.
• + — holding momentarily activates it.

That last pair is a genuinely underused performance tool: park the pedal in “+” with a deep, fast setting, leave it engaged and silent, and stab the switch for a one-bar burst of warble at the end of a phrase. No preset changes, no tap-dancing.

Note also that divisions run 2× slower when applied to ramping than when applied to the RPM rate.

Footswitches

The right switch is bypass — true bypass via relay, and per Chase Bliss extremely quiet. A dip switch (MoToByp) converts it to momentary, so the effect is only active while your foot is down. The left switch is Tap/Hold, and in normal mode it always honours the last two stomps, which means you can correct a bad tap immediately without waiting out a timeout.

Presets

The lower toggle recalls two presets — one in each outer position — with the middle position always reflecting the live positions of your knobs, toggles and dip switches. Saving is the standard Chase Bliss ritual: hold the right (bypass) stomp for 3 seconds, then hold both stomps together for another 3 seconds; the LED blinks and the setting is stored. For the left slot, do the same but hold the left (tap) stomp first.

One thoughtful detail worth knowing: if you recall a preset and then move a knob, the LED above the toggle goes dim to signal that the live state no longer matches what’s stored. If you want to keep the change, save it again. That dim-LED indicator saves a lot of confusion on a dark stage.

The Sixteen Dip Switches

The left bank assigns Lag, Mix, RPM, Depth and Warp to ramping or to expression/CV control. The right bank decides whether each of those parameters rises or falls. Plug anything into the EXP/CV jack and the pedal automatically switches from ramping to expression control for those parameters.

The remaining switches: Bounce (parameters travel back and forth rather than ramping once and holding), Hold, MoToByp, Tap Control (R = tapping sets the ramp rate, P = tapping sets RPM), Tap Division, and Sweep (T = ramp travels from the current knob position to fully clockwise; B = from the current position to fully counterclockwise).

Two rules that will save you: ramping always resets when you bypass the pedal, and all dip switch positions are saved with presets. The second is the good news — you never have to reach down and flip a physical switch mid-song, because your two presets can hold entirely different routings.

There’s also a hidden trick: with something plugged into EXP/CV but no parameters dip-assigned, you control the waveform directly. On this pedal that’s effectively an analog whammy, with its range set by the Depth knob. Depth full clockwise gives the widest sweep.

Korte’s own advice in the manual is the correct advice, and we’d repeat it to anyone: forget the dip switches for the first few weeks. Learn the six knobs and two toggles, get good at those, and come back to the routing when you have a specific problem you want it to solve.

Famous Players: What Actually Holds Up

Chase Bliss pedals attract a particular kind of player — session musicians, sound designers, people whose job is texture rather than riffs — and the Warped Vinyl has been on some serious boards. But the evidence base here is thinner than for, say, a Tube Screamer, and some of what circulates online doesn’t survive checking. Here’s what does.

Charlie Worsham — the strongest case

The clearest, most specific confirmation is Charlie Worsham, the Mississippi-born country artist and Nashville session weapon. Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundown with Worsham, filmed by John Bohlinger at Sony Studios in Nashville and published 30 April 2025, lists his pedalboard in full: a Sonic Research ST-300 tuner, Browne Amplification Protein, Mythos Mjolnir, Guyatone ST2, Electro-Harmonix Canyon, Neunaber Immerse, Strymon El Capistan, and a Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl HiFi.

Two things make this a strong citation. First, it names the HiFi specifically rather than the family. Second, it’s a studio board — Worsham was mid-tracking session when PG caught up with him — which tells you something about where this pedal earns its keep. Worsham’s rig on that day was built around vintage acoustics (a 1963 Martin D-28 he famously bought twice, a Gibson J-50 he reckons is on more of his records than anything else) and a Fender Princeton Reverb alongside a Nashville Amp Works tweed Deluxe clone. That is a warm, midrange-forward, decidedly un-shiny setup, and a BBD-based modulation with a wet-only tone knob is exactly the right tool for adding movement to it without adding brightness. Worsham is not currently in our guitarist archive, so no link — but the board is documented and dated.

Dweezil Zappa — confirmed brand, unconfirmed version

Dweezil Zappa runs a Warped Vinyl, and we can be precise about where. In his Premier Guitar Rig Rundown published 5 February 2025 (also by Bohlinger), filmed ahead of a Memphis date on the Rox(postroph)y tour marking the 50th anniversary of his father’s Apostrophe (‘) and Roxy & Elsewhere, Zappa’s rig is described as four racks of pedals feeding a complex stereo switching system. The right-side rack contains a “Clown Vomit” fuzz, a Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl, a Korg FLG-1 flanger, a Chase Bliss Generation Loss, and a Goochfx Holy Cow, plus a second Red Panda Raster.

Here is the honest caveat: PG’s writeup says “Warped Vinyl,” not “Warped Vinyl HiFi.” Given that three versions exist and Zappa is a documented collector of odd and older gear, we are not going to claim the HiFi on that evidence. What the citation does establish, solidly, is that the pedal is trusted in one of the most demanding, most tonally-specific touring rigs in the business — and that it lives on the wet-ish, texture side of a stereo rig rather than in the core signal path. The rest of his 2025 setup, for context, is built on a Fractal Axe-Fx III with an Eventide H90 and TC Electronic TC 2290 feeding both sides, a TC Electronic PolyTune 3 Noir on the floor board, and a Chase Bliss Automatone Preamp MkII in the bottom rack. Two Chase Bliss pedals in one touring rack is a data point in itself.

Dweezil Zappa isn’t in our guitarist archive; Frank Zappa is, and while Frank obviously never touched a pedal built two decades after his death, the guitars in this rig — the Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar Les Paul Custom, the Roxy-era SG — are his, and the article is worth your time.

The lineage, not the usership

This is a distinction we apply to every legacy-adjacent SKU, and it applies here. Plenty of famous guitar sounds are ancestors of what Warped Vinyl does without being played through one. Being clear about the difference is the difference between a gear guide and a rumour mill.

The Edge, Robert Smith and Johnny Marr built the 1980s chorus vocabulary that the Lag knob is reaching toward — but they built it on Boss and Electro-Harmonix boxes of the era, not on this. Kevin Shields‘ pitch-warping on Loveless is the most famous “the whole record sounds like it’s melting” guitar sound ever committed to tape, and it came from a tremolo arm and a Yamaha SPX90, not from a BBD vibrato. Jimi Hendrix and David Gilmour gave the Uni-Vibe its reputation, and the Uni-Vibe is a distant relative of this circuit’s ambitions rather than an ancestor of its design. Jonny Greenwood is the modern player whose approach to modulation-as-instability most closely rhymes with what Warped Vinyl is for.

None of these people, as far as any first-party source we could find shows, own a Warped Vinyl HiFi. They are here as a map of the territory, not as a customer list.

What we could not verify

Chase Bliss has an unusually visible online community, and the Warped Vinyl turns up constantly in social-media board shots attributed to well-known names. We are not repeating any of those. Our standing bar is a dated, photographed board in a published rundown, a manufacturer artist page, or a direct quote in an interview. A screenshot surfaced by an aggregator is not evidence, no matter how plausible it looks. If a name isn’t in this section, it’s because we couldn’t get it over that bar — not because we think the player is lying.

Eight Tone Recipes

Chase Bliss shipped the HiFi with a set of example presets built by session guitarist Mason Stoops, with evocative names — First Drive Thru, At the Beach, Memory, The Wharf, Now and Then, Pasadena, 1987 T-Shirt, Looking Back, Motorcycle, Hollywood Cruising. Those are worth hunting down on the company’s SoundCloud. The following are starting points of our own, described in knob positions rather than presets so you can dial them by ear.

How It Compares

Buying Guide: A Discontinued Pedal, and Why

In August 2024, Chase Bliss announced the discontinuation of five pedals: the Condor, the Warped Vinyl HiFi, the Thermae, Dark World, and the Automatone Preamp MkII. The reason is not commercial and it’s worth understanding, because it directly affects what you should expect from a used unit.

All five designs use light-dependent resistors — vactrols — that contain cadmium sulphide. The RoHS exemption permitting cadmium sulphide in audio applications expired, and with it the ability to legally manufacture and sell these pedals in most of the world. Remaining stock was sold through a dedicated US-only storefront, after which the pedals became unavailable new anywhere.

Two things Chase Bliss did in response are relevant to buyers. First, they extended the warranty on the discontinued pedals to lifetime, with postage paid in both directions — the stated reasoning being that they want the pedals working and making music rather than sitting in landfill. Second, on the safety question, they were explicit: the cadmium sulphide is sealed inside airtight epoxy and plastic components inside a metal enclosure, exposure risk is described as incredibly low, and owners can and should keep using them.

So: this is not a pedal that was killed by poor sales or a design flaw. It was legislated out of production, which is a very different thing, and the used market has priced it accordingly.

What to check on a used unit

• Confirm the version. Original, mkII and HiFi all say “Warped Vinyl” on the enclosure. The HiFi has the Lag knob — six knobs total. The original hides its dip switches underneath rather than on the side. Sellers conflate the three constantly, and the price gap is real.
• Test every dip switch. Sixteen side-mounted micro switches on a pedal that has probably lived under someone’s foot for years. Cycle each one and confirm the behaviour changes.
• Test both presets. Save something to each slot, power-cycle the pedal, and confirm both recall. Preset memory is where digital-brain pedals fail first.
• Test the EXP/CV and Tap jacks. TRS jacks on pedalboards take abuse. Bring a cable.
• Listen for hiss at extremes. Some hiss is normal and expected (see below). Excessive hiss with Lag and Tone at noon is not.
• Ask about power history. Given the manufacturer’s own bluntness about wrong-polarity damage, “what did you run it from?” is a fair question.
• Confirm the warranty status. The lifetime warranty announced in 2024 is a genuine asset attached to this specific pedal. Ask the seller whether they’ve registered anything or dealt with support.

Who should buy one

Buy a Warped Vinyl HiFi if you want modulation as a compositional element rather than as a coat of paint — if the phrase “asymmetric waveform” makes you curious rather than tired, if you’re building parts in a studio, or if your existing chorus feels too polite. Buy something else if you want a set-and-forget stage chorus, if your board has no room for a pedal with sixteen switches you’ll need to think about, or if you need pristine, quiet, wide stereo. Warped Vinyl is mono, a little noisy on purpose, and rewards attention.

Living With It: Ownership Notes

The hiss is normal, up to a point

Chase Bliss are refreshingly direct in their own FAQ: “There is always going to be some amount of background hiss in Warped Vinyl.” Their prescribed mitigation is to keep Lag and Tone at noon or below, and beyond that, to adjust the internal compression trimmer. That trimmer exists, it’s documented by the manufacturer, and it’s the correct first stop before you assume something’s broken.

It can be overloaded — and that’s a signal-chain problem, not a fault

The BBD chip can clip when hit with a hot signal. If you’re getting unwanted distortion, Chase Bliss’s own remedy is either to turn down what’s feeding the pedal, or to set up a send/return so the signal is attenuated on the way in and boosted on the way out. This matters most if you’re running the Warped Vinyl after high-output humbuckers, a boost, or a loud buffer.

Placement

Standard modulation placement — after drive, before delay and reverb — is the safe default and works well. Because the Tone knob affects only the wet path, this pedal is unusually good at sitting after a dirt pedal without dulling the drive itself. Running it in a parallel loop, if your board supports it, unlocks a whole other approach: keep the dry signal untouched and ride the wet volume as an effect send.

Ramping resets on bypass

Worth internalising because it’s counterintuitive. Any ramp in progress is cleared when you bypass. If you’re relying on a slow ramp as a build across eight bars, you need the pedal engaged for the whole of it.

MIDI clock

The pedal accepts MIDI Program Change, Continuous Controller and MIDI Clock over TRS. If you’re already running a MIDI controller for other pedals, the Warped Vinyl slots straight in and syncs its rate to your clock, which turns a wandering pitch modulation into a rhythmic device. It’s also compatible with the Empress MIDIbox, which is how many owners got MIDI onto their boards before TRS MIDI became standard.

Frequently Asked Questions