Behringer NR300 Noise Reducer Pedal

First time using a noise gate. Heavy distortion and being close to my amp squeals were becoming unbearable. This pedal calms them down, with no need to spend big dollars for a pedal. If I was giggling, I may want a metal body, but for me at home, it works great. Buy it!

THE GOOD:-It works. It actually works.-Threshold AND decay knobs make dialing in just the right amount of silence easy.-KILLSWITCH. This Mute switch is awesome. Flip it, now it's a killswitch. Very handy.-Send & return effect. This is pretty cool, but does no good for me since in my rig, I already have send & returnTHE BAD:-This thing is CHEAP. It is made of plastic, and is very light, so I wouldn't go dropping it off the back of a truck or anything.-NO POWER SUPPLY. There is no power supply that comes with this pedal, and finding out where the 9V battery goes is annoying and took me and my buddies about 15 minutes to figure it out. There are two little buttons at the hinge of the actual button of the pedal, you need to push both of those in with paperclips, or an AUX cable will do nicely (Search on YouTube "Behringer battery replacement." You'll find it). Very annoying and frustrating, and does not make for a quick switch at a gig.I am currently using this for my vocal rig to replace an expensive rack-mount dbx compressor and gate that just doesn't work properly anymore, and seems to generate noise of its own. This does fantastically. it DRASTICALLY reduces the buzz in the speakers to a point where we can actually play and not hear it throughout our playing. We cranked up the threshold so we have to be right on top of the mic to be heard through the speakers which is what we want, then we turn the decay up high so we can crank the PA without getting feedback in the mics after singing a line. This thing works, and it works well. I plan on getting on for my bass rig to act as a Killswitch AND a noise gate. Best of both worlds! Without breaking the bank, Behringer has done it again, and made a quality piece of electronics, and though they could have gone with a metal housing, I can't complain. For $25, come on. You'll probably mount it on your pedalboard and never touch it enough to remember it's made of plastic and not metal. This one's a win.

Does it’s job well in between playing. It would work best probably on stage in between songs while the band is getting ready to play the next song. If that makes sense. It also serves as a killswitch on the ”Mute” setting, which is a nice addition. So, here’s the deal. I mainly play hard rock and metal, for other styles I play doesn’t need a noise gate (cleans mainly, whether it’s some jazzy licks or funky chords). The metal has lots of percussive licks with frequent pauses. It does a good job of gating fast enough during these immediate stops, but I find with the decay set far enough to minimum for it to eliminate noise as soon as I stop playing, it does suck some tone. However, not everyone will be using this pedal for those purposes and it otherwise works nicely with other styles of music. Another thing to consider is, I have not used many noise gates in my 10-15 years of playing guitar, so this one may work just like the rest of most of the gates available today. I have however found a little sweet spot that is right where it needs to be to not cut my notes off too soon and not suck too much tone. You just have to play with it a little and have some patience. I started with both knobs right in the middle, turned one all the way up and then both all the way up and down, just to get a feel for exactly what both controls do. I ended up with the threshold around 2 o’clock and the decay around 9 or 10 o’clock. I am pretty satisfied with those settings. I have not used the send/return jacks as I have pedals already in my amps fx loop. My chain consists of: Guitar > tuner > noise gate > overdrive > Amp, FX Loop Send10 Band EQ > Delay > Chorus > Fx Loop Return. The quality of the pedal seems as if it will be fine, even though it’s plastic. It’s fairly hard plastic and has a silent switch, like a Boss does. I don’t think it could endure years on the road like a Boss, considering it has a metal enclosure. You get a nice trade off with the Behringer though, I would much rather spend 25 bucks on one of these and get the value. I’ve also used the compressor and it works great. It’s just a great time for guitarist and bassist to purchase pedals. I say the value is there for these pedals. I originally really wanted the TCE Sentry or the EHX Silencer, but I thought I must test this first since it’s far cheaper. For now, I will be keeping this pedal as my main noise gate, but I plan on getting the Sentry sometime down the road as it caters more to the needs of a metal guitarist. If money isn’t an issue for you and you play similar styles of music, take a look at the TCE Sentry, ISP Decimator & G Strong, MXR Smartgate and EHX Silencer, to name a few. All of the other Behringer pedals are worth a look, IMO and provide tremendous value. If this pedal was more than 50 bucks, I’d go 3 stars. For 25, you can’t beat what any of the Behringer line has to offer. 4 stars. I hope this review was helpful to some.Thanks

Works really well, now that I have it hooked up correctly. With guitar "IN" and pedal chain on "SEND", I can set the threshold at the minimum -- it doesn't get confused between 60hz pickup noise and noise from effects pedals then. That is super important, as I found out -- because if you put your pedals into "IN" then you have to dial threshold up so it doesn't think pedal noise is you playing and when you do that, well.. don't do that..I didn't understand all this before purchasing, but am thankful that I chose this pedal over one that doesn't have the SEND/RETURN ports. It also doesn't fight my comp/sustain pedal like this as well.. Very pleased! :)I wasn't really expecting to use this much.. More like a mute button in between playing, since I assumed it would clip my sustain. but it has turned out be central to my rig and when setup correctly has no impact on my tone.*update* the pedal is not working too great now that I've got the effects chain mixing back into a clean signal at the end. the NR300 gets VERY confused about that and I'm not sure why. It's giving me a "dead battery" effect when enabled (muting sound sporadically without the threshold triggered). I moved it over to a 300mA line and it has the same issue so I don't think it's power related. I suspect it is something with my signal -- when I add distortion and overdrive it works fine again.. then again, signal sounds fine with the pedal disabled.. so .. I don't know.. definitely has me motivated to try a different noise gate