Pseudo-splines of integer order (m, ) were introduced by Daubechies, Han, Ron, and Shen as a family which allows interpolation between the classical B-splines and the Daubechies' scaling functions. The purpose of this paper is to generalize the pseudo-splines to fractional and complex orders (z, ) with α := Re z ≥ 1. This allows increased flexibility in regard to smoothness: instead of working with a discrete family of functions from C m , m ∈ N0, one uses a continuous family of functions belonging to the Hölder spaces C α−1 . The presence of the imaginary part of z allows for direct utilization in complex transform techniques for signal and image analyses. We also show that in analogue to the integer case, the generalized pseudo-splines lead to constructions of Parseval wavelet frames via the unitary extension principle. The regularity and approximation order of this new class of generalized splines is also discussed.MSC Classification (2010): 42C15, 42C40, 65D07