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An effective vibration control device, the pendulum tuned mass damper (P-TMD), can be easily realized as a mass supported on rolling or sliding pendulum bearings. While the bearings' concavity provides the desired gravitational restoring force, the necessary dissipative force can be obtained either from additional dampers installed in parallel with the bearings or from the same friction resistance developing within each bearing between the roller/slider and the rolling/sliding surface. The latter solution may prove cheaper and more compact but implies that the P-TMD effectiveness will be amplitude dependent if the friction coefficient is kept uniform along the rolling/sliding surface, as in conventional friction bearings. In this case, the friction P-TMD will be as efficient as a viscous P-TMD only at a given vibration level, with large performance reductions at other levels. To avoid this inconvenience, this paper proposes a new type of sliding variable friction pendulum (VFP) TMD, called the VFP-TMD, in which the sliding surface is divided into two concentric regions: a circular inner region, having the lowest possible friction coefficient and the same dimensions of the slider, and an annular outer region, having a friction coefficient set to an optimal value. A similar arrangement has been recently proposed to realize adaptive seismic isolation devices, but no specific application to TMDs is reported. To assess the VFP-TMD performance, first its analytical model is derived, rigorously accounting for geometric nonlinearities as well as for the variable (in time and space) pressure distribution along the contact area, and then, an optimal design methodology is presented. Finally, numerical simulations show the influence of the main design parameters on the device behavior and demonstrate that the VFP-TMD can achieve nearly the same effectiveness of viscous P-TMDs, while considerably outperforming conventional uniform-friction P-TMDs. The proposed analytical model can be used to enhance or validate existing models of VFP isolators that assume a constant and uniform contact pressure distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]