Behringer US600 Ultra Shifter/Harmonist

This is an update to my previous review. See below- customer support.

In all fairness to Behringer, I did finally get a response from them offering to replace my other pedal under warranty. It took longer than I feel it should have but they did do the right thing.

This is not that complicated. It took less than a minute to figure it out. The controls are reasonably responsive.

The manual is not a lot of help, it is really more of a tip sheet. Does not provide much detail but if you have prior experience with shifters etc. you will be ok.

I am using a Marshall combo with a few pedals patched into the effects loop of the amp. Normally a pitch shifter in line after the distortion will have a lot of trouble recognizing the pitch. I would say this one does a pretty good job of it.

The detune sounds dark, not impressive. The Harmonizer is pretty good, at least as good as the Boss version. the trem bar and other effects are decent and easily controlled, not bad.

What can I say, I did purchase several Behringer pedals at once, new, on ebay.

One of the three did not work as it should. The other two, ok so far. I am not holding my breath.

All in all, their quality control appears to be lacking or non-existant.

FOR GET IT! I called and spoke to their customer service several times over a two week period. They were very helpful and even sounded concerned. I was promised each time that they would send me the details/authorization to send it in for repair or replacement. THEY NEVER FOLLOWED THROUGH. THE PEDAL IS NOW IN THE TRASH AND MY MONEY WAS WASTED.

Look the pedal is not bad, the price is cheap. Is it worth risking your dough? Thats up to you just don't expect that Behringer is going to help you out. I would suggest you don't buy their products from anyone that you can not return it to for a refund. As far as repairs later ...consider this stuff disposable. If you get to you it long enough to get your moneys worth then you are lucky and you did ok.

This pedal is very easy to use. Must only look at the panel and use your ears.

I don't know what is the musical experience of the other guys here, but i have about 35 years of musical experience, a lot of the world best guitarist gear and i say to you that this pedal is pretty good. It has a soft and nice sound, and bery quiet also.
If you think that there are about 2 or 3 harmoniser pedals in the market you can easily check them prices and their features and sound. Next you compare. I'll repeat to you. This is a very, very good pedal.

I think so, as much as of the rest of my gear.

Very kind and effective.

I'm a hobbyst musician, my source of incomings doesn't came from the music i play. I play a litlle of all kind of music with a special enfocus in Rock, Blues and Symphonic Rock and Pop. For all that i've said above i tell yoy, again, go quicly buy this pedal if you really want an harmoniser or a pitch shifter or a (very good) detune pedal.

I bought this for one reason and one reason only. The intelligent Harmoniser.

I dont need a pitch shifter or a whammy pedal. I have that in my Digitec Whammy Pedal and in two of my floor boards.


Rather then waste 5 minutes of my time typing. Let us just say that function does not work.

Very robotic.

In fact it is dreadful, the tone is just destroyed through this thing.

It would be unfair of me to answer this becasue I no longer use it.

Behringer to tend to be pretty good on there question and answer support site. So I see no reason why they would be any different with this product.

Ok, it is not an Eventide harmoniser or a TC Electronics G-Force

BUT it is advertised as an intelligent harmoniser, so should therefore work. Even if it worked 90% of the time and the resultant sound was grainy and robotic, I would be very happy.


But it failed 99% of the time. It is not funny performing a Thin Lizzy song at a gig and the harmony decides to flicker between a minor and major third 99% of the time. This pedal should never have been released on the market. At the moment the only true way of having intelligent harmony's is by using high end studio kit like the Eventide or TC Electronics that cost thousands of pounds.


The US600 may be cheap, but even if it was free it would be no good if it did not do the job.

not difficult despite the dashboard looking like a small flight manual. 2 outs wet/dry is provided thankfully, which can help with the tone suck mentioned in the review before. also agree about the lack of detents - poor - & the light being too bright. couple of beers & a pressure gig & one twist of this old girl could spell instant migraine; maybe missing a dimmer switch. can;t get it to work with an expression pedal tho, tried couple of different numbers to no avail. are we restricted to behringer's own exp pedal here? there's no other explanation. but yeah pretty straighforward, particularly if you skim thru the manual once or twice. marking it down for the pedal, detents & interrogation light problem.

now i'm using this with a bass. i specifically wanted pitch shift & harmoniser. i knew it was a gamble but at this price it was a risk i didn't mind taking. in saying that tho, i did mail behringer beforehand to ask if it was suited to bass at all - buy it & see i was told. um, it aint the best, no real surprise. the tone suck isn't too much of an issue as i run a two channel genz benz 750 with fx thru FET & dry signal thru tube so the bottom end is a constant. tracking is actually much better than expected but the pitched signal sounds like a high oboe patch on a cheap casio kbd or something past +2 so i stay away from that. harmoniser is way off the mark, unusable for the most part. flutter is neither here nor there for me, same with detune, but i'm loving the trem setting. variable-time slide from original note to anything +/- 2 octaves is great for little effects here & there. you just step on the pedal to activate, step off to return to original. rev your bass liek an engine. i love this for little touches here & there, a poor man's whammy if you will. for ??30 bucks this effect alone is fine for me but considering that the pedal is supposed to do so much more, it aint all that. might be better on guitar but i sort of doubt it.

this baby's plastic & looks weak next to my other fx. the design is very conservative too. don't know how dependable it is yet having not had it long but did i mention that it's plastic? i'd happily use it without a backup as it's probably employed in 2% of my set as a bit of flavour so no worries there.

behringer are a bit crap here IMO. telling me to buy it & see effectively - haven't they done any factory testing? how low does this thing go was all i needed to know. mailed em then about the fact that i can't get an exp pedal work with it & have had no reply after more than a week. not impressed uli.

been playing for 16 years odd now. active jazz V deluxe with high b (love it) & an extensive fx chain to a genz benz 750 with 4x10 & 1x15 GB cabs. i play different styles, from rock thru funk to jazz & d&b. the trem effect comes in handy when things are getting weird & used tastefully.

if it was lost or stolen i'd probably say 'oh well', get off my *** & raise cash for a bass whammy. if my whole chain went with it however i'd self harm.

all in all, mostly ***** but one good feature for me. but if i was a rich man i'd make sure i had something that does this much, much better.

It's simple enough - just plug in and start messing with it. Sadly, the mode and pitch knobs aren't detented, so it can be hard to tell for sure you have them set in the right position. Each time you go from one setting to the other, the LED will acknowledge it with a slight red blink, which helps. Turning the effect off while adjusting it also helps - the blue LED is so bright that it effectively blurs out everything around it, making it hard to even see which knob you're adjusting, let alone which setting you're turning the knob to.

The delay time and mix knobs have different functions, depending on the mode. In the "trem bar" (whammy) and flutter modes, the mix knob controls the overall volume, which caught be off guard a couple of times.

The regular pitch shifter works just fine - set it to whatever interval you like, and that's what you'll get (regardless of key). The pitched sound can be a little glitchy, though, even on relatively small pitch changes.

The detune mode works well - here, the pitch knob sets the amount of positive or negative detuning you want, the delay time knob controls the amount of delay before the detuning is applied, while the mix knob simply controls the ratio of clean vs detuned signal. Set it up for a slight detune, and you have yourself a nice 80's style chorus-type sound. I did find this sound to be slightly metallic sounding, though, so I'd much rather use a proper chorus pedal for this.

The trem bar and flutter sounds work just as they should - press the footswitch, and the pedal does its thing until you release the switch. The delay time knob controls the amount of time the pedal takes to reach the pitch you've set it to (trem bar) or the speed of the flutter. The mix knob sets the overall level, and needs to be set to fully cw (100%) unless you want the pedal to significantly drop the level. The bad thing is that there's no way around this - as soon as you turn the mode knob to either of these settings, you lose all your volume unless you already have the mix knob fully up. And even with it set to full, there's still quite a noticeable drop in volume and punch, compared to when the pedal isn't in the chain. Not good.

But that's nothing compared to the harmony setting. The idea is to tell the pedal what base interval you want to add (a third would be the most common, probably) and then tell it which key you're playing in. The pedal should then be able to "intelligently" add the right amount of pitch shift for each note, to make it fit the song's key. Sadly, this does not work at all... Consistently (about 95% of the time) it either played the wrong interval (a major third in a minor key, or vice versa) or couldn't decide which interval to play, leaving it fluttering between major and minor thirds until eventually settling on... the wrong one...

I tried every key, setting it to add a third up and playing the base note in all keys (a D for D major and D minor, an A for A major etc) and it consistently got it wrong. I finally got it to actually play the right intervals by playing a B major scale (and only those notes) with the pedal set to B minor...

The pedal itself doesn't sound too bad - the pitch-shifting is a little glitchy here and there, and overall the sound has a distinct metallic tone to it. But I probably would have given it a 5 or 6 here. However, as the pedal steals quite a bit of signal in the modes that actually work, and even more since the "harmony" setting absolutely doesn't seem to work properly, I'll have to give it a 1.

I have no idea how reliable it would be - it's brand new and hasn't even been released worldwide yet, so time will tell, I suppose. I won't find out, though - it's going straight back to the dealer, as it didn't even come close to doing what it says it can do...

If you only want a straight pitch shifter or want to do whammy noises, and can live with the fact that it takes large chunks out of your signal quality, by all means get it. If you want an intelligent pitch shifter (so you can add harmony parts), look elsewhere. For someone else, who uses the pedal differently, the rating might be decent. Me, I needed it to perform reasonably well in the harmony setting, and it turned out to be useless. A 1 it is, then...