So just reading the MD price thread got me to thinking back to before I had one…I was desperate to get my hands on something that had similar capabilities but in software.
I ended up using a Reaktor patch for a while that was pretty good and I tried to mod it to have UW capabilities, but I never got that bit to work. (something to do with tables I didn’t understand).
Anyway, it’s many years later now. What’s the best software emulator you’ve seen for Machinedrum or Monomachine?
I’ve never tried to emulate these machines as close the real thing as possible. Instead I try to adopt their “spirit” whenever a song or tracks calls for it. In that sense, to capture the spirit of the MM, I take a monophonic instrument, create a monophonic sequence, and automate parameters in a step fashion with each step starting at the start of a note to the start of the next note. I don’t bother to try to find synths that are close to the engines the MM provides because I find that to be shortsighted and limiting. I grab whatever synths I feel may make the sounds I hear in my head, and go from there.
If I do want to get that shitty MM sound “in spirit”, then I would reach for something with lo fi qualities. Odin 2 has a nice chiptune engine to get those SID machine sounds. Vital could do lo fi wavetables. Odin 2 could also do the Superwave stuff, but Odin 2 actually sounds really good compared to the MM, so maybe Synth 1 is a better choice. Maybe Surge XT can cover all these sounds plus the FM+ stuff.
I would use the same approach for the MD: find drum synths, use them monophonically, use one-step-per-note automation to mimic p-locks. As for the sounds, there are so many analog style drum synths out there to replace the MD’s TRX machines, so chef’s choice. For the EFM machines… hmmm… Inear Display has a FM based drum synth that pretty awesome. I don’t know about physical modeled drums, but insert a physical modeled drum synth or general synth in here. For the E12 machines, I would find some old school drum machine samples, load them to a drum sampler plugin like TAL-Drum, add some subtle sample rate and bit depth reduction.
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