If ever there was a pedal that screamed 2026 it is MXR’s Textures, a “Granular Synth Engine” that belies its compact form factor to offer guitar players the capability to turn their electric guitar tone into something ambient and ethereal, to take it off the beaten path.
Somewhere, a few evolutionary steps back, Textures would be a delay pedal. That’s the processing lineage from which it came, taking your sound and playing it back to you – but when it comes back to you expect that sound to be altered. How it is altered is very much up to you.
You can reverse the repeats, freeze them, “feed them back into cascading shimmers”, or embrace chaos with randomisation – and you know what the Joker says about chaos, “it’s fair”.
“With the power of granular synthesis and dynamics processing, this pedal records what you play and reshapes it into a shifting blend of tones and timbres,” explains MXR. “Shimmering pads, glitched-out rhythms, lush reverberations drifting back through themselves, and much more. It’s a sandbox in pedal form, and every grain is yours to shape.”
As one comment under the YouTube demo reads, “We live in times where you need a 37-minute-long video to understand a pedal. That said, it sounds great!”
Needless to say, this is for the adventurist. As MXR/Jim Dunlop suggests, the player who wants to explore guitar ambience, to score films, or the noise-rock player who wants to do something anarchic in high-gain, high-volume scenarios.
Some pedals do the thing you are looking for them to do. Others will do something you haven’t ever thought of until you stick it on your pedalboard and step on the footswitch. Textures is the latter.
The pedal is controlled by six dials for Time, Size, Overlap, Mix, Pitch and Regen, plus Mode and Reverse buttons. If, at this moment in time, you are thinking it’s all a bit bonkers then rest assured there are presets. You can also hook up an external tap tempo control. MXR describes it as “a sandbox with no boundaries”.
Like any self-respecting sandbox without boundaries, you can of course apply reverb, filter, and vibrato to these “grains” that the pedal is playing back to you. It can be run in mono, wet/dry, or true stereo.
Where to start with a pedal like this? It’s daunting. But it comes out of the box pre-loaded with eight presets. And see that video at the top of the page? There is your 37-minute long demo that explains all. Many may already be sold by the time it gets to “Reverse Random.”
Textures is available now, priced £279/$269. See Jim Dunlop for more.
