Alexander Pedals took their glitch-centric Syntax Error, shrunk it down, and added more ways to break your signal. The Syntax Error XP is the Leap Series version – smaller enclosure, same digital chaos, now with stereo ins and outs because destroying one channel of audio apparently wasn’t enough.
Eight modes live inside. Stretch does varispeed timestretch, sampling your playing and mangling it like a dying tape machine. Cube is digital distortion squared—literally, some algorithm involving absolute value of input cubed times three, plus a resonant low-pass filter for extra squelch . Wave does frequency modulation. Air gives you lo-fi rack reverb from the dawn of digital, back when reverb sounded like broken electronics pretending to be space. Glitch Shift pitch-shifts with artifacts. Ring does ring modulation with sample-and-hold LFO. Freq frequency-shifts without preserving intervals—bubble sounds, gargle sounds, random modulation that occasionally lands on something musical. Dynamic bit-crushes and sample-rate reduces.
The Leap Series interface (the 5th pedal sporting it) means three knobs per page, an OLED screen telling you what you’re twisting, and eight pages total. Thirty-two presets. MIDI over that MultiJack. Expression control that morphs between settings. RAMP function turns the whole thing into an LFO—cycling between two sounds indefinitely, phasing, moving, never sitting still .
On forums, users call it a “WTF is that” pedal. The kind of box where sweet spots exist but they’re fractions of a degree wide, where you go from “Eureka” to “what the fuck” every three minutes. Stretch mode’s buffer length sometimes randomizes on preset recall – a three-second delay becomes 300 milliseconds without warning. It’s not plug-and-play. It’s for sonic anarchists who don’t care what comes out so long as it’s bent or broken.
Stereo configurable. TRS options. USB for updates. 80mA. Made in North Carolina.
If you remember dirty game cartridges corrupting audio, dial-up handshakes, the sound of early digital failing beautifully—this is that in a box. It’s not a tool. It’s a collaborator with impulse control issues.
