Some time ago I got a deal on a pack of 10 behringer pedals on sale. Most of the pack was made by chorus pedals, such as the UC200, but there were also some other effects, such as this TP300 Ultra Tremolo/Pan, which I demo in the video bellow.
As you probably already know, Tremolo is an amplitude effect, in which the volume of the instrument varies in time in a periodic fashion. This can be easily achieved on most synths by modulation the output amplifier with a LFO. But the Volca Keys doesn’t have this routing available, or you may have already used all your LFO resources on other modulation. This is where a Tremolo Effect (either in hardware or software) can be useful when playing a synth. Similarly, the auto PAN feature of this pedal can also be done by routing an LFO to the PAN of the amplifier… provided your synth as a stereo output, and that routing is available.
The TP300 is a very simple pedal, with four modes of operation: two tremolo modes (one with a triangle LFO and another with a Square LFO), and two auto-pan modes, with the same options in terms of LFO shape. In the middle of the front panel you have a DEPTH knob to control the intensity of the tremolo (volume range) or of the pan (stereo width). Finally, you have the RATE knob that allows you to set the velocity of the LFO. On top of the RATE knob you’ll find the traditional Behringer bright blue LED showing the power status of the pedal, and also a red LED pulsating in time with the LFO. This latter feature is a nice touch, but is a poor compensation for the lack of a proper way to set the LFO’s rate to a tempo subdivision, either by taping the tempo, or by putting some scale markings around the RATE knob. The build quality is similar to other pedals from Behringer’s 300 series: it feels significantly better than the ones from the 200 series, but it is still not as sturdy-looking as the ones from the latter 600 series.
One odd thing I noticed about the pan modes on this pedal is that is appears to be joining both A and B inputs into a mono signal before applying the pan. This can be good for non-aural synths like the Volca Keys, which offer the same signal on both left and right channels, and can thus have their outputs summed (boosted). But if you’re planning to use a proper stereo synth with this pedal, you should be aware of some undesired interactions between the two output channels.
Of course, you could also use some post-processing plugin on your DAW after recording the mono signal from one of the Volca’s channels. This would also give you the change to sync your tremolo/pan to the bpm and do other kinds of audio magic happen. Hence, I think this pedal is more for the live gig, and for free playing on your own. Unfortunately, Behringer appears to be phasing out their pedal catalogue, and at the time of writing this post I could not find an international supplier for them. You can still search them on e-bay as they come by from time to time. If you can get it for cheap, it will give you some interesting textures for you to improvise on… even if at the end of the day, you end up recording the straight mono signal and apply tremolo/pan as a post-processing effect. :)