A trip down plastic-covered memory lane...

Today we’re taking a nostalgic step back with the Behringer TO100 Tube Overdrive, a pedal that, for better or worse, was the gateway drug into the world of effects for me at very least.

My own first foray into pedals came courtesy of Behringer’s gloriously affordable plastic boxes. I was in a band at the time, and the other guitarist had a Boss BCB-60 absolutely chock full of Boss pedals. Naturally, I wanted to follow suit. The only problem was that he was deep into his apprenticeship years and pulling in actual money, while I was a skint student. A board full of Boss pedals was pure fantasy, but scraping together enough cash for a few £15 plastic alternatives? That I could manage.

One of the very first pedals in that budget collection was the Tube Overdrive. And I’ll be honest — when I first plugged it in, I wasn’t impressed. My teenage idea of good tone was simple: more gain, everything on maximum. How could less possibly be more? More is more (Yngwie, is that you?). Even with the gain dimed, the Tube Overdrive just wasn’t enough for my under-developed ears. I was, of course, completely wrong.

Fast forward a good few years, and it’s worth revisiting this pedal with a much more experienced — and slightly more sensible — set of ears.

The general consensus is that the TO100 is heavily “inspired” by the Ibanez TS9, and it behaves exactly as you’d expect from a Tube Screamer-style circuit. It’s a single-coil player’s best friend, filling out that naturally scooped midrange and adding a lovely sense of weight and chonk to the tone. It also excels at the classic Screamer job of pushing an already driven amp, tightening up the low end and adding a bit of grit and growl to a cooking sound.

Of course, the big complaint that oh so many had was about the plastic enclosure. To keep costs as low as possible, Behringer opted for plastic rather than metal, and at the time the internet was full of horror stories about switches collapsing under a heavy foot mid-gig.

Here’s my real-world experience: I’ve had this pedal since I was about 19, and this exact unit endured roughly two years of weekly gigs and numerous rehearsals. On top of that, it’s spent the last decade being stored… let’s say not carefully. And yet, it still works absolutely fine. No drama, no failures, no sudden structural collapse under a Chuck Taylor. Blokes on the internet not knowing what they're talking about? Funny that...

I will concede that the pots feel a bit cheap, and if anything were to give up the ghost, I’d expect it to be one of those. But functionally? It’s as solid today as the day I bought it — or more accurately, the day it was bought for me. And for the £15 it cost at the time, it doesn’t owe me a single thing.

The Behringer TO100 might not be glamorous, and it might not win any awards for build materials, but as a no-nonsense Tube Screamer-style overdrive, it absolutely does the job. Looking back, I wasn’t unimpressed because it was bad — I was unimpressed because I was bad. It's ok, my ears got better.

Twice the phasers, twice the fun?

 Today, we continue with the next instalment in the long-running series titled “Behringer’s lawyers are certainly earning their keep.”

This time, we’re looking at the Behringer Dual Phase — formerly known as the Bi-Phase — a pedal that is very clearly, ahem, “heavily inspired” by the legendary Mu-Tron Bi-Phase. And when I say inspired, I mean lovingly, meticulously, and with an eye on exactly how far one can push things before legal letters start arriving.

Behringer are more than happy to tell you that this pedal contains 12 opto-couplers, which I’m assured is very important if you want to recreate the wild, swirling madness of the original. Somewhere along the line, however, someone in a suit must have cleared their throat, because the name quietly shifted from Bi-Phase to Dual Phase. Much like the saga with the mythical horse-themed overdrive that eventually became the Zentara, Behringer have a habit of colouring just inside the lines… until someone reminds them where the lines actually are.

Now, onto the pedal itself.

You do not accidentally buy a Dual Phase.

First of all, it is absolutely enormous. It is, without exaggeration, about the size of a fully grown human face. I even took a photo of it next to my own head, and it pretty much eclipsed the lot. Choosing this pedal means committing a serious amount of pedalboard real estate. This is not a casual “I’ll just pop a phaser on the end” kind of decision.

Then there’s the power draw. Those opto-couplers don’t come cheap — electrically speaking. This thing demands a whopping 700mA. Not asks. Demands! So not only does it take up half your board, it also insists on the finest quality current you can provide. You’re not choosing this pedal by mistake. This is a deliberate, intentional life choice.

If you’ve got the relevant cajones (or cajonas — I am definitely inclusive 😂) to make this your modulation of choice, there is an absurd amount going on under the hood. With more knobs and switches than a small aircraft cockpit, this is a long way from your set-and-forget Phase 90.

The left side handles what you might consider the “business end” of the operation. You’ve got rate, depth, and feedback — everything you need to sculpt your phaser from a gentle, shimmery swirl to a thick, chewy warble. The feedback control lets you tiptoe right into those glorious 1950s B-movie sci-fi laser sounds too, which is always a bonus. You can also switch between sine and square waveforms, adding either smooth movement or a more abrupt, choppy modulation feel.

The right side, however… this is where things go completely off the rails.

Alongside similar controls, you get access to Sweep Generator 2, which fundamentally changes the voicing of the phaser. Sweep Generator 1 is the “normal” phaser — lush, musical, and familiar. Sweep Generator 2 is its unhinged cousin. It leans hard into weirdness, chaos, and full-on sci-fi nonsense. If the left side is business, the right side is very much the party.  It takes the logic of the humble mullet.

And of course, being called the Dual Phase, you’re not expected to keep these two worlds separate. Engaging both sides at once is not only possible — it’s actively encouraged. This is where the pedal truly earns its place, unlocking sounds you probably didn’t even know you wanted, and finally justifying why you’ve dedicated half your board and most of your power supply to a single modulation effect.

Is it practical?

Absolutely not.

Is it for everyone?

Definitely not.

Is it huge fun?

Without question — and with an emphasis on huge.

It’s also still far cheaper (and likely far more reliable) than hunting down an original Mu-Tron on the used market. If you’ve ever wanted to dive headfirst into the deep end of phaser madness, the Behringer Dual Phase might just be the most gloriously excessive way to do it.

The Redemption of the DS-1

 The Boss DS-1 is a rite of passage for most guitarists. It’s the pedal that sits in that perfect sweet spot between being affordable, available everywhere, and making a massive difference to your sound the very first time you stomp on it. I’m genuinely not exaggerating when I say that probably 60% of the people reading this bought a DS-1 as their first pedal — or at least within the first handful of pedals they ever owned.

But the DS-1 is also a victim of its own success. Because it’s our first pedal, we’re usually not as, shall we say, refined with how we use the controls. Who knew that putting everything on 10 wasn’t the secret to perfect tone? So we end up carrying this idea that the DS-1 is a blunt instrument: fun, loud, chaotic, but not exactly subtle. As we improve as players, we start chasing more boutique tools to shape our sound, and the humble orange box gets shoved aside.

But in the immortal, unavoidable words of Taylor Swift: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
The DS-1 was never the issue.

The tone control is a perfect example. I remembered it as being mush at one end, fizzy at the other, with a tiny sliver of sweetness in between. But sitting down with it again, there’s actually a lot of colour in the sweep — almost like it shifts where the midrange sits in the EQ. Sure, the top of the dial can be a little spiky, but there’s far more nuance than most of us gave it credit for back in our teenage bedroom-rock days.

The gain control is the real surprise, though. We often treat the DS-1 as the “Kurt Cobain pedal” and assume it only does that one saturated grunge tone. But there is so much light and shade through the whole range. On a Strat neck pickup, low gain almost acts like a treble-boosted push — bright, dynamic, and touch-sensitive. Around a third of the way up, you get a gritty breakup that responds beautifully when you dig in. And yes, cranked all the way, you get that classic saturated roar, but even then it’s more “amp on the edge” than people remember.

Of course, this design dates back to the late ’70s, and it’s not flawless. The noise floor is noticeably higher than modern distortion pedals, especially at higher gain. The old-school side-mounted jacks aren’t exactly pedalboard-friendly either, now that most new pedals are going top-mounted. But for something you can pick up used any day of the week for a very reasonable price, the DS-1 still holds up shockingly well.

It deserves its place in the pedal history books — and honestly, it might just deserve another spot on your board.