Loop Pedals > Red Panda Tensor Pitch- and Time-Shifting Pedal

Red Panda Tensor Pitch- and Time-Shifting Pedal

The Red Panda Tensor’s powerful pitch- and time-shifting tools put an expansive array of surprising effects at your disposal, from live reverse, tape stop, glitch, freeze, and pitch shift to time stretch, looping, and more. The Tensor creates complex sounds but is easy to use, with spacious controls, top-mount jacks, two footswitches, and additional features like preset options when combined with an external MIDI controller. It’s an endless well of creativity

Stutter, stretch, shift, randomize, and reverse

The Tensor achieves flanger, vibrato, and chorus-like tones at neutral settings, but time- and pitch-shift controls easily push your playing into ambient flows and glitched melodies with otherworldly character.

Time and pitch shifting

Time, speed, pitch, wet/dry blend, and randomization each get their own precise control knob. The time knob allows up to 4 x sped-up or slowed playback without any changes in pitch when in standard bypass mode. These time controls can take your playing from haunting lows to heavenly highs when combined with the pitch knob’s wide -2 to +2 octave range.

Speed and randomization

The speed knob gives you 1-turn access to various tape machine sounds. There's reverse playback to the left, forward to the right, and neutral in the middle. The intelligent randomizer knob creates changes to intensity of pitch, time, and speed for surprising sounds tailored to your active settings. And because the randomizer is sensitive to the Tensor's other knobs, the randomizer leaves certain settings like pitch and speed alone when they're set to neutral. Little details such as this keep the Tensor musical, even when things get weird.

Loop, latch, momentary, and more

The Tensor’s dual footswitch design means it can be used as a traditional stompbox or as a workstation. The right footswitch engages the pedal while the left "hold" switch controls looping. Each footswitch has two modes (momentary or latching) controlled by a toggle; the different modes let you do everything from momentary rewind effects to sputtery latched glitching. Two additional toggles let you select different playback modes (forward, alternating, and reverse) and three looper styles (overdub, record, and next). Tensor loops can last up to 9.4 seconds in mono and 4.7 seconds in stereo.

Boutique backend

The Tensor includes lots of backend options for more customization. There's an option for stereo output, and controls can also be mapped to an external expression pedal for hands-free adjustments. You can even configure the expression pedal to control the Tensor's voltage for over and underpowered sounds. Also onboard are two ways to use MIDI with the Tensor: USB or TRS. MIDI connection also lets you dial-in and save presets for recall, and it’s easy to build presets using the Tensor's external web editor. For even more control, you can connect a remote switch to the Tensor’s expression pedal jack and use it to trigger presets when playing live.

Red Panda pedals: a sea of experimental exploration

Red Panda started in 2009 with the goal of catering to experimentally minded musicians. Their pedals combine modern signal processing, fine-comb research, and hardware with a classic, sturdy feel. Red Panda pedals are prone to pop up on a variety of famous pedalboards — from Nels Cline of Wilco to Tera Melos' resident pedal freak, Nick Reinhart. Each Red Panda pedal is tested for quality assurance before shipment and assembled in the company’s Detroit facility