Five days ago we covered Joe Landers’ Gearmulator fork, which emulates the Motorola DSP chips inside Elektron’s Machinedrum and Monomachine and runs the original firmware in a DAW. It’s the rigorous approach, and it comes with the rigorous requirement: you need ROM files dumped from hardware you own.
Now there’s the other kind. A developer has built a Machinedrum you play in a browser tab — no install, no plugin host, no ROMs — at machinedrum-study.pages.dev.
What it does
- All four drum engines: TRX, EFM, E12 and PI
- Per-drum editing: AM, a one-band EQ, multimode filter, distortion, sample-rate reducer
- Delay and reverb
- A creative drum sequencer with two modes
- Runs in desktop, phone and tablet browsers
- No built-in recorder — capture with OBS or similar if you want the audio out
Recreation, not emulation — and why that distinction matters
The interface states plainly that this uses non-original sound simulation. It is not running Elektron’s firmware on a virtual DSP. Someone studied what the engines do and rebuilt them.
That’s a meaningfully different project, with a different trade:
- Chip emulation (Gearmulator) is authentic by construction — it is the original code — and inherits the original’s licensing entanglement, which is why you must supply your own ROMs, and its CPU cost, which is why early reports flagged heavy use.
- Recreation owes nothing to anyone’s ROM. It can be given away freely, run anywhere, and be modified. What it cannot claim is bit-exactness, and it will differ from the hardware in ways enthusiasts will find.
Both are legitimate, and this week has produced both for the same instrument, which is a nice accident of timing.
The real argument: zero friction
The thing worth noticing here isn’t fidelity. It’s that a link is the entire installation process.
A DAW plugin needs a DAW, a host, an install, a scan, and in Gearmulator’s case a ROM you probably don’t have. A web page needs a tap. That difference decides who ever touches the instrument: students, people on a phone on a train, anyone curious about why the Machinedrum’s sequencer is spoken about the way it is.
For the web-audio crowd it’s also a demonstration of what browsers now do comfortably. Four synthesis engines, a full effects chain and a sequencer, running at low enough latency to play, on a phone. That was a research demo not long ago.
If you want to understand parameter locks and Elektron sequencing before deciding whether to buy anything, this is now the cheapest possible way in — and our step sequencing tutorial pairs with it directly.