Behringer Noise Reducer Nr300 Ultimate Noise Reduction Effects Pedal

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 & return THE 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

I bought the Behringer NR300 Noise Reducer and the Behringer CS400 Compressor Sustainer at the same time. (My comments are identical for both pedals.) For me, this pedal does a great job at 1/4 the price of the popular competing brand. My official rating is 4.5. I'm docking 0.5 point for the difficulty in replacing the battery (details later in this review). By all means, check the other reviews for their impressions of this effects pedal. I'd like to address some things I haven't seen in other reviews. Based on my experience, you MUST power this pedal with a FRESH 9V battery. And remember, batteries don't last forever. As the battery reaches the end of its useful life, you will begin to hear unpleasant distortions. That's the time to put in a new battery, or switch to a 9V adapter. Beware, though, that sound may be degraded if you power the pedal with a garden variety 9V adapter. I tried a random adapter that was lying around, and I got the same gravely sound as I did from a dying battery. My theory is that cheaper adapters may have significant amounts of AC coming through on top of the DC, and that AC can leak into the signal processing circuitry and affect the sound. Some AC on the DC is okay if you are a powering a lamp, but not if you want unadulterated sound coming from your guitar. So use only a high quality adapter. I use the Visual Sound One Spot Adapter, available here on Amazon. I can't detect any of the distortion I heard when using a dying battery or cheap adapter. Yes, the One Spot is more expensive than other adapters, but it's designed specifically to power effects pedals. While you're ordering the One Spot Adapter, get a Visual Sound One Spot Multi-Plug Cable so the adapter can power multiple effects pedals. There's another reason not to use batteries. You must remove the pedal from the base to get to the battery compartment. The pedal is very difficult to remove and replace. The pedal pivots on two spring-loaded pins that are an exact fit into the holes in the pedal. Removing the pedal is awkward, at best. When replacing the pedal, it's difficult to get the pins lined up with the holes. If I were regularly using batteries, I would chamfer the inside corners of the holes, or carefully drill out the holes to make them a few thousandths larger. One surprise was the battery connector. It's a hefty plastic unit, unlike the cheesy 9V connectors found on most products—you know, the kind that are wrapped in vinyl and feel like they will break when you are trying to pry them off the battery. Frankly, this is the first product I've encountered with a high quality 9V battery connector.

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

After purchasing and returning the heavy metal distortion pedal from Behringer I did not have a lot of faith in this product but I was very impressed after I hooked it up and listened. I have a lot of noise from my Fender Maverick amp with my Epiphone SG when I had my gain up but that’s what I like so I tried the distortion pedal first to see if it was cleaner because I was told that may help but it was worse and didn’t sound as good as my amp by itself and I returned it. I then was told about a noise reduction pedal or noise gate pedal and I almost pulled the trigger on a Boss pedal because I was more confident with it but I decided to try the Behringer Noise Reducer because of the price and I knew I could send it back quickly if I didn’t like it and I am keeping it. I hooked it up and it makes all the difference in the world even with gain all the way up. I turned it off and I could hear the feedback and noise and was checking the distortion and it didn’t change it at all but did get rid of the frustrating noise that is a pain when playing rock. I am sure this isn’t for everyone but my problems went away and for a fraction of the cost of the other pedals. It’s worth a chance.

i cant say a lot because i haven't used other noise reduction pedals. but you have to understand how noise reduction pedals work in order to use it properly. This one definitely blocks the hum from the ac power sources. About hiss. This is a noise gate pedal which means it will block hiss from other high gain sources (like other distortion pedals on the pedal chain) only when you are not playing. Threshold. I cant explain it properly but i can explain it this way. If you set the threshold in max, you will get a weak signal feeding to your amp, therefore weak sound. Set it too low and noise reduction is lessened, full sound. Decay is the control on how quick the pedal will apply the threshold settings. Set it to max if you want to activate noise reduction immediately after your guitar signal passes through. ( you will lose sustain if you do this because the pedal "reduces" the signal together with the noise very quickly.) you have to play between the settings of threshold and decay. I put this on the end of the chain. Overall an OK pedal. does its job. Unlike some other reviews, this pedal does not add noise.

See my review of the CS-400. Great introductory pedal, definitely serves it's purpose. Definitely recommend using the send/return loop for your noisy pedals though it won't shield the loudness of say a Boss DS-1 (MIT). Between this and the TU-300 (Tuner),you'd really have to be nit picky with replacing these as they do do their job. Only reason I'm switching out the NR-300 for something else is so I can have my other pedal modified. You'll be hard pressed to find anyone out there modifiying Behringer pedals because all the parts within are so cheap it would cost too much to upgrade when you could just buy another pedal. Nowadays, people are selling pedals pretty cheaply that you could grab a few Boss/MXR pedals reasonably, which is what I'm doing. I consider myself entering intermediate level as there's certain capabilities and sounds I want out of my pedals thus the need for snatching pedals that I can have modded. Refer to above about Behringer and modifying. All in all, I have enjoyed Behringer pedals and have no ill-will against them. As you grow your knowledge and experience using pedals and searching for your tone you'll find some just won't measure up anymore, which is understandable. No one keeps the same tastes in anything as gain experience and knowledge and pedals are no exception. Start out your pedal quest with Behringer as they're cheap then slowly switch them out as you grow into specific tastes for tones. It's also the reason I switched from a solid state amp to a tube amp because some years ago I simply didn't notice the difference, i was too green on the music scene, lol. Happy hunting!!

I have a 1974 Fender Stratocaster with single coil pickups. I use a ZOOM effects generator. This device effectively suppresses the wideband noise from both. I also live close to an AM radio transmit tower and I get the station pickup on my guitar and effects box and this helps reduce that interference as well. I use the Behringer DC power supply instead of the 9V batter. Make sure to have one power outlet and a power strip to plug in all your pedals and amp so the electrical ground is common and this device will work well for the price point. Be patient when getting your set point with the controls. It takes a bit to adjust the Threshold and Delay with the correct volume settings on the guitar and effects pedals. Once you get those volumes set this box delivers good fidelity across the audio spectrum for my Strat.