Alexander Pedals Marshmallow Pitch Shifter Pedal

Alexander Pedals is part of a new wave of stompbox brands that aims to really push the envelope when it comes to guitar effects. The Marshmallow is certainly experimental; a sophisticated pedal featuring dual pitch shifter engines that can produce wild modulated pitch-altered trails - truly transforming your tones!

Here's what Alexander Pedals says about the Marshmallow:

“Marshmallow?” That’s a silly name for a pedal, we know. But it totally fits. Sweet, fun, and probably best consumed in small doses, our Marshmallow makes weird gooey sounds with your favorite instruments. At its heart, Marshmallow is a pair of pitch shifters that we combine and modulate in interesting ways with a variety of magic tricks.

Want smooth chorus? No problem. How about juicy organ tones? Yup. Maybe you want your stuff to sound like a cat on helium? Yes, we do that too. Basically, Marshmallow is a quick way to start at normal and end up at “what was that?!” We hope you like it as much as we do.

Sounds & Controls

Marshmallow does a lot of stuff, but that doesn’t mean that it’s hard to use! Generally you can just turn the knobs on the pedal and explore new sounds, but we put a few extra controls on the pedal that we think you can use.

Tap the center Select button to move to the next Effect Mode. You’ll notice that the small LEDs in the center of the pedal change to show the current Effect Mode. If you hold the center Select button, you can access the “Alt Functions” for the pedal knobs. 

Here’s a run-down on what all of the knobs do in each Effect Mode of the pedal:   

MOD (upper blue) - Combines twin pitch shifters with an adjustable pitch modulation. Great for chorus, vibrato, and organ effects.

ARPY (lower blue) - Fully configurable arpeggiator. The first pitch in the sequence is always unison, and you set the other three pitches with the VOICE, TWO, and MOD knobs.

RAND (upper red) - Twin pitch shifters with random modulation. VOICE and ALT set the “home” pitches of each shifter and MOD sets how far they’re allowed to move. 

RING (lower red) - Twin pitch shifters with an adjustable fade / tremolo effect. Low settings of MOD sound like tremolo or panning, higher settings sound like robot barf

DYNA (upper violet) - Dynamically controlled pitch shifter. VOICE sets the “quiet” interval and TWO sets the “loud” interval. Adjust MOD to control the sensitivity of the envelope detector. ALT sets the shift behavior to either glide between pitches or smoothly fade

CLOUD (lower violet) - Twin pitch shifters with an adjustable cascading delay / reverb effect. Increase the MOD knob for more clouds, lower the CLOCK knob for longer delays.

Loading & Saving Presets - Have you ever spent a lot of time tweaking your gear to get the sounds you really love, only to find that your pedal knobs moved between your practice space and the gig? Or maybe you need a lot of sounds but don’t have a ton of room on your board for multiple pedals? 

Presets To The Rescue!

Marshmallow and all of our other Neo Series pedals have built-in preset capability. That means you can save and recall four sounds from a single pedal with no extra hardware or funny business. If you do have a MIDI controller, the preset capability expands to 16! 

Pitch Lock - While it is fun to pitch shift to random intervals, it’s also cool to lock in to musical pitches. To help you get the most out of your Marshmallow, we’ve added in Pitch Lock, which “snaps” the range of the pitch shifters to different tuned intervals. 

To change the Pitch Lock setting, hold down the center Select button and then hold the RAMP footswitch. The upper LED will change to indicate the current Pitch Lock setting.  

The four settings are: 

UNLOCK (violet) - No lock, pitch is fully variable.  
CHROMATIC (yellow) - Pitch locks to semitone / half-step intervals.  
MAJOR (cyan) - Pitch locks to the major scale intervals.  
MINOR (green) - Pitch locks to the minor scale intervals.

The Pitch Lock settings are saved as part of your presets. 

Warp!

Marshmallow features an advanced expression functionality we call WARP! This allows you to seamlessly morph between two different pedal settings with a single tap of your toe. 

Tap the left footswitch on the pedal to begin the WARP effect - you will see the WARP LED light up and the main LED will fade from white to blue if the pedal is engaged. You will then hear the pedal slide from its current settings to the WARP settings. If you want to engage WARP for a short time, for example to accentuate a phrase, you can hold the left footswitch to engage then release to go back to normal.   

To set the normal and WARP sounds on Marshmallow, first tap the left footswitch until the WARP LED is off. Next, turn the knobs to set the sound you want for the normal setting. Please note that the alternate knob functions may also be set at this time! Finally, tap the left footswitch until the WARP LED is on and set the knob positions as desired for your WARP sound!