Behringer NR300 Noise Reducer

First and foremost, this pedal does the job and does it well.

I play heavy riffs through a high gain amp which naturally has a lot of noise. The gain on my amp is almost always cranked up to the maximum. I have many pedals in my signal chain and each one of them contributes to the overall noise. When I turn this pedal on, there is a very noticeable and immediate silence.

I have read a few reviews that said that this pedal cannot reduce the noise enough.
I wonder what kind of noise they are trying to reduce. I assume that there is a misunderstanding on how a noise gate operates.
Please understand that a noise gate pedal will never reduce the noise of pedals or components that come AFTER it in the signal chain.
It will never reduce the sound of the actual signal, it will only reduce the sound/his/hum when you stop playing. As soon as you start playing, it will disengage and let all the sound/noise go through it. If you are trying to clean or shape the actual signal, use an EQ pedal instead. Please keep these points in mind and adjust your expectations from a noise gate pedal accordingly.

The pedal has send/return loop which is quite helpful if you know how to take advantage of it.

It has a plastic box and feels cheap. Although I must say that I have never seen a pedal that was broken because it had a plastic box. I think it is only a feeling thing.

I use this pedal before the amp or in the effects loop of the amp and both situations in performs well. No matter what I play I always find a use for this pedal. It’s worth the money.

Well... It's a noise gate. It does what it says it does. With some caveats.

It works pretty good, but even at the slowest decay setting it can be a little slow to activate. There's 2 modes - mute and reduction.

Mute works by completely stopping the signal when treshold is reached, and reduce, just reduces the noise overall above a certain treshold. Both modes have their uses depending on what you need, but the decay on the mute setting is a little slow so i would not recommend it to someone who plays "djenty" riffs as it won't activate so quickly between the note rests.

For pretty much everything else, it's very usable. You do have to know what the controls do in order to utilize it properly (as with all gates) because it's not one of the "intelligent" gates. It works how you set it up. So if it doesn't work like you want it to, adjust the controls.

The quality is what you get from around $20 pedal. It's completely plastic, connectors are wonky at best and the on/off switch is really not suitable for freuqent stomping. You get what you pay for in this department. The knobs and the switches are ok though.

It has 2 ins and 2 outs so you can use the 4 cable method to even gate the preamp section of your amp through the FX loop. That's an amazing feature and it works well!

I recommend it to someone who either doesn't know if they need a noise gate or needs one that will stay firmly planted on the pedalboard and not stomped on too much because the stomp switch feels flimsy and will probably break with frequent use. Leave it on and forget about it, that's the best use of this pedal because it does the job, just won't stand up too much abuse.

I bought this pedal for my second guitar player in my band as he needed some noise reduction for his single coils in his electric guitar.

I use the boss version of this pedal so I can confidently say as far as sound both pedals are exactly the same to me ( no surprise there as Behringer has been known to copy)

The main difference being ( to be expected at the fraction of the cost) is the build quality - It being made of plastic it may not last as long as the boss. But saying that this is pedal that you will only turn on once and leave on - So there won't be much foot stomping so the pedal should last.

In conclusion if your looking for cheap noise reducer at a fraction of the price I would highly recommend.

This pedal has the standard in/out jacks, as well as send/return jacks (for an FX unit that is too big for your pedalboard, like a guitar amp modeller or a big rack unit).
There are three controls: mode, thresh (threshold) and decay. The mode switch offers the choice of either mute or reduction. The odd (in a good way) thing about the mode switch is that when the pedal is switched off and the mode switch is flipped to mute, noise reduction is turned on. This neat feature is not mentioned anywhere in the instruction paper sheet that comes with the pedal or even on the packaging. I thought I'd mention it here so people will learn about it.

The threshold sets the level below which noise will be removed. The noise reduction of this pedal is very effective; I only have it set at a few millimeters from the lowest possible setting. That's enough to turn off the noise of my phaser, chorus and flanger pedals in between the notes I play. The decay control sets how fast/slow the noise reduction will turn off when the guitar is louder than the threshold. There's two LEDs; one indicates when the pedal is on and the other lights up whenever any noise gets reduced.

Overall it's a pedal that offers a necessary function at a very reasonable price. I'd give it all fives if it was made of sturdy metal instead of weak, flimsy plastic, but I guess we can't get everything the way we want it.
If you need a noise reducer with an FX loop I recommend this one.

It takes too much time to react to sound going below the threshold. What am I talking about? I hit a power chord, then rapidly mute everything with both my hands, and then after half a second this noise gate starts suppressing the noise. But the threshold was set as low as possible and the decay was set to "min"!!! So, in this case, the noise gate wasn't really doing much. This is pointless.

If you're OK with this noise gate having a very slow reaction, you shouldn't have any problems. However, if you want a noise gate to engage almost instantly, don't waste your money on this one and invest in something better. I guess, there can't be cheap and at the same time decent noise gates.

I got this pedal in hopes to reduce the feedback my single coil Strat makes when using gain and to possible reduce unwanted noise when using guitars in general at high gain. It didn't really do that. While it indeed reduced some unwanted noise, it also reduced wanted sound as well.

So now I use it not to eliminate unwanted noise, but to change the tone of guitar a little - to suppress it. You can get some interesting sounds with this pedal, but I feel it's a little different than what I wanted it to do in the first place, hence the 3 stars.

Build quality is good and all the knobs and materials are well put together. This pedal is quite affordable, so you can give it a try.