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.