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Elektron's Machinedrum and Monomachine Now Run in Your DAW, for Free

A Berlin developer's fork of the open-source Gearmulator project emulates the DSP chips inside both instruments. It needs your own ROMs, it's still alpha, and it's already playing twenty-year-old SysEx dumps.

3 min read

Few instruments hold their value like Elektron’s Machinedrum and Monomachine. They’re over two decades old and long discontinued, but they still set the standard for what “Elektron sequencing” means. Now they run as software.

Berlin-based developer Joe Landers has released emulations of both in gearmulator-md-mm, his fork of The Usual Suspects’ Gearmulator project. The latest build is v0.1.0-alpha.11, published September 11. It’s free and licensed under GPL-3.0.

Emulating the chip, not the sound

These aren’t plugins designed to sound like a Machinedrum. Like the rest of Gearmulator (the family that brought back the Access Virus and Waldorf’s Microwave), they emulate the actual silicon. Both instruments shipped with a pair of Motorola DSP56303 chips, and the emulator runs the original firmware on a virtual version of that hardware. The synthesis engines aren’t modeled. They’re the originals.

That design comes with the usual condition: you need ROM files dumped from your own hardware. The project doesn’t distribute them.

What works

  • Standalone app and VST3 plugin, with builds listed for Windows, macOS and Linux
  • Recreated front panels, including key chording, parameter locks by shift-clicking a step, clickable encoders, and secondary functions by clicking a label
  • SysEx file transfer, so existing patches, kits and patterns from real units can be loaded
  • Audio routing: host audio can feed the machines’ input effects and sampling, and the VST3 supports multiple outputs for separate tracks

Landers’ demo video makes the SysEx support concrete. The emulations play back SysEx dumps associated with Autechre and dating from 2008. Whatever you think of emulation, hearing archived patterns come back to life on a laptop is the strongest case for it.

The caveats

It’s alpha, and it’s heavy. Early reports flag high CPU use, especially on older machines. Cycle-accurate DSP emulation costs a lot, and optimization usually comes later. Expect bugs, and don’t build a live set around it yet.

Development may be AI-assisted. SYNTH ANATOMY speculated about this, and the repository includes a CLAUDE.md file, which suggests it. That doesn’t say anything about quality either way, but it’s worth knowing, and it’s part of a broader pattern of niche emulation projects moving faster than they used to.

Support comes from Landers, not TUS. His fork isn’t affiliated with The Usual Suspects, and the README asks users not to take support questions to the upstream project.

Why it matters

Machinedrums and Monomachines are aging hardware with parts that fail. Emulating them at the chip level keeps the instruments playable after the hardware is gone, and keeps decades of archived patterns playable too. That’s a preservation argument as much as a convenience one. Having it in a DAW at no cost is a bonus.

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