Berlin developer Joe Landers has published Gearmulator MD/MM, a free fork of The Usual Suspects' Gearmulator project that adds emulations of Elektron's Machinedrum and Monomachine. The most recent build, version 0.1.0 alpha.11, was released on 11 September.
Both discontinued instruments ran on pairs of Motorola DSP56303 chips, and the project emulates that hardware. Landers describes the repository as "my fork of TUS's gearmulator project that adds the Elektron Machinedrum + Monomachine", adding that he is not affiliated with The Usual Suspects and asking people not to contact them for support.
The emulations do not ship with anything from Elektron. "Elektron firmware is not included. You must supply your own supported Machinedrum and Monomachine firmware files," the release notes say, leaving owners to dump those files from their own hardware.
The interfaces reproduce the original panels, including parameter locks, key chording, encoder clicking and secondary functions reached by Alt- or Option-clicking, with adjustable panel sensitivity. SysEx files can be sent to the emulated machines, host audio can be routed into their input effects and sampling functions, and the VST3 build supports multiple outputs.
Formats and system support
The release packages contain standalone applications and VST3 plugins, with separate builds for Apple Silicon Macs, Intel Macs and 64-bit Windows. The code is published on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 licence. The macOS builds are not notarised, and the download includes instructions for getting past the resulting security warnings.
The project is at an alpha stage. Alpha.11 fixed an EFM-SD fault on Windows and Intel Macs that caused lost tones and noise, corrected Machinedrum program change reception, and addressed timing problems affecting audio input and DAW sync. Synth Anatomy reports that users are seeing very high CPU usage, in some cases saturating older machines.
Via Synth Anatomy. The source and builds are on GitHub.
