Behringer UM300 Ultra Metal Distortion Pedal

I’m not huge Behringer customer but of the items I’ve purchased, never had an issue and the sound quality is pretty much on par with all the more expensive items.This pedal is well built, fully featured for a wah pedal and sounds great once you dial in your preference, which is easy to do if you take your time and try the various combinations.The battery compartment is not an issue and is easy access and secure. I gotta question that one reviewers intelligence that they weren’t able to make it work. It’s just like most toddler’s toy that requires a 9V.It is a switchless wah so it activates as soon as you step into it and it deactivates if you take it back to its standard position. The reviewer complaining about that obvious hasn’t used a switchless wah or is just uncoordinated. Pretty easy to use and great for players who sit when they record, like I do.I’ve owned the Bad Horsie and the Dunlop switchless wah and they work and sounds great just like this one but for 2-3 times the price. For someone who doesn’t use the wah that much, likes to sit down and record with a wah and isn’t brand/status conscious, this is an awesome deal at $50.

This pedal was fire

If you want a quick review of this pedal (the Behringer TM300) let's just say it might work for you but be prepared to send it back.I'm trying to sell a keyboard amplifier combo that has 65 W, with a 15 inch speaker and a horn tweeter (it's a Peavey KB-100). You can use it for keyboards, bass guitar, and vocals without changing anything about it. But because it's a solid-state amplifier from around 1990 it doesn't sound good with electric guitars. So I looked for a cheap pedal that would make the amplifier really howl.This Behringer pedal, like most Behringer pedals, is a clone of a more expensive pedal. I believe it's a copy of a Sans Amp GT-2, which costs typically close to $200. For around $25 it seems something that I should look into. It "changes" your amp into a Fender, Marshall, or Mesa Boogie. Since to get one of those amps would cost you probably over $1000, the $25 seemed reasonable.The controls on the Behringer pedal let you choose between the three makes of amplifier I mentioned above, and there is a mic position switch, and three varieties of drive. As well as this there's a volume control, bass and treble knobs, and a drive (distortion) knob, so you can dial in the exact sounds you like. I saw a YouTube demo of this pedal, and was very impressed.When I received this pedal I tried it out and the first thing I noticed was an intrusive hiss. There are several solutions to this, but I was worried that the prospective purchaser would find the hiss annoying, and of course I had no idea which instrument they wanted to use it with. So in the end I wrapped it up and UPS came with a label to send it back to Amazon for a full refund.I'd like to address some concerns that I see about Behringer pedals. The main criticism is that it costs too little "and it can't be any good." The electronics of today is different from those of yesterday. When you don't have any development costs to design circuits, and you already have market research from companies like Boss, pedals can be cheap.But the big cost saving in reproducing a pedal is modern assembly methods, particularly Surface Mount Technology (SMT). Because you don't need human hands to assemble circuits, components can be very small. Circuits are put together by machine from spools of components at the rate of tens of thousands parts an hour and automatically tested.Another issue with Behringer pedals is that "They're plastic, so they'll break." There is a video on YouTube of a guy trying to destroy his pedal by kicking it across the room, throwing it what looks like a metal statue, and standing with both legs on the pedal. It still works. Think about the remote control for your TV - you sit on it, then push it down into the couch, and your dog decides it is a new dog toy. But usually when it fails, it's not the case but the internal parts. I don't see anyone advocating metal cases.I was impressed by the thickness of the plastic of the pedal I had. I would use it to throw at the head of some dirty thief who stole my irreplaceable Squier Affinity Strat, and with the metal baseplate I'd use the pedal to hammer in nails. If you give it the slightest amount of respect it will last. If you're intent on apeing that bats*** guitarist and jump on it, remember he probably has a whole boxfull of pedals and a roadie to swap them.The only complain that affected me was installing the battery. Behringer uses this method in most of their stomp boxes, and it's not obvious how to do it. Where the pedal pivots on the case there are black lugs on either side. Use a ballpoint pen tip to push these in, one at a time, and when each one is completely pushed in you should use your third hand to push the foot switch cover up and away.Inside you can see the battery compartment with the connector for the nine-volt battery. Place the battery (that you supplied) into the compartment, connect it, and you're all set. This sounds worse than it actually is (especially if you have a third hand), but my advice is to get the Behringer power adapter. With the adapter you have the space in the pedal for the battery to hold whatever you want, and no indication that you have a secret compartment. Do you get my drift . . . drift . . . drift?I'm feeling a little guilty about returning this pedal - not because it was faulty (it was) but given a little more time and no prospective buyer to impress I might have been able to deal with the hiss. The amp I'm keeping is a solid-state Fender Princeton 65 (watts), and most people's verdict on this is that it's LOUD. I try to keep the volume down on it and also on my guitar. That means that the signal is not very loud, and so any extra noise from a pedal is noticeable.So, had I not been pressed for time, I should have experimented with volume levels, particularly with my guitar. Any pedal that hisses or hums is going to sound worse with a low signal. Another fix would have been a noise gate. That's a pedal that waits for a strong signal before it lets it on to your amp. Between songs your amp is silent, but when you play, a hiss or hum will sound from anything before the noise gate. Usually the guitar signal is so strong that it will drown out this extra noise.So this hasn't put me off Behringer pedals, and YouTube demos of the TM300 show it performs pretty well. If you're concerned about getting a clone, almost every company has produced a pedal based on the circuit of Ibanez's Tube Screamer under their own name. If you know exactly which make of amp you want to emulate you could use one of a range of Joyo pedals (JF-13 through 16) which reproduces the sound of one of the amps here (Fender, Marshall, Mesa Boogie, and on Joyo alone, Vox). These have only one company's sound but a greater range of controls, are made of metal (for what that's worth) and cost in the low end of the $30 range. Each of them has YouTube demos.But I guess I was spoiled by getting the $50ish Zoom G1oN Guitar Floor Multi-Effects Pedal, which has far more effects, many different amp sounds, and is completely silent. I think we'll see a Behringer competitor to the Zoom before too long, and I welcome the competition.

Pleasantly surprised at how precise the tuner is whether used with the bypass or connected to the tuner output on my combination (monitor). Also, would recommend getting a 9VDC power adapter otherwise batteries may become a problem.

I was quite hopeful about this replacement for my dead Cry Baby pedal. I like the idea of the dual power source and the auto pedal return. There are tons of great reviews. Seemed like a sure thing.Wrong. While the pedal build quality was generally great, the battery compartment and installation was ridiculous - tricky to mount the battery in the housing lid, and it fell out easily.The real deal breaker, however, was how incredibly noisy the pedal was. Pedal movement was good and the auto return spring felt great to use, BUT the circuit switching off and on every time the pedal went all the way to heel down position was extremely noisy, with cracks and pops and cutting off the sound altogether for a split second. It was horrible. The whole point to an optical wah pedal is being quieter. This isn't.I tried positioning my foot to avoid the full heel down position, but that just made it harder to use the pedal to get any usable effect. It might work better if there was a resistive threshold that warned you of getting too close to the off position and made it enough harder to go full heel down. Maybe.In the end, it was just too finicky for me. Also, it would not let you use the pedal as a fixed bandpass filter by leaving the pedal part way throught the range of movement.While the hardware on-off pushbutton seems like extra work, the switching noise from this pedal makes it completely unusable for me. I am going back to a pedal that has a hard on-off switch and retains a mechanical pot on a gear. Yeah, it may wear out and have other issues, but I am not a working mucisian and I don't wear out gear very often.I generally love Behringer gear, but this is a serious fail in my opinion. I returned it.