Universal Audio

Bill Putnam Sr. founded Universal Audio in 1958, having already built the first modern recording console and engineered records for Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles out of his own Chicago studio. The company closed for a time after Putnam's death in 1989 and was re-founded by his sons Jim and Bill Putnam Jr. in 1999, rebuilding around the Apollo interface line, which launched in 2012 and paired studio-grade converters with real-time plugin processing. The UAFX pedal line, launched more recently, brought the same modelling approach to the pedalboard. On GuitarBomb we mostly cover the UAFX pedals and the free plugin drops UA runs regularly. Here's what we've written.