Two weeks after Elektron told its own community to stop sharing firmware mods, a brand new one for the Model:Cycles landed anyway. It is called Model-TG, it comes from a developer going by TinyGreg, and it does not live on Elektron's forum at all. It lives on GitHub.
What does Model-TG actually add to the Model:Cycles?
The Model:Cycles ships with six FM-based machines and nothing to sample with. Model-TG bolts on a seventh: a stereo sampler with seven playback modes, one-shot, loop, slice, granular, time-stretch, Karplus-Strong pluck and wavetable, plus a slice editor and internal resampling so a track's own output can be captured and reused. It layers in 12 master effects (drive, crush, rate, pump, filter, ring mod, noise riser, gate, tape stop, vinyl and flanger), attack envelopes and extra filter control on the stock FM machines, retrig and beat-repeat, scale lock, and sample transfer over USB via Elektron's own Transfer software. It does not add multi-track USB audio. The firmware patches directly into stock OS 1.13.
"Everything the Cycles already does keeps working," the project states, the baseline claim any custom firmware has to clear before anyone trusts it with their hardware.
Why is this landing right after Elektron's ban?
On September 16, Elektron updated its Elektronauts community guidelines to ban sharing firmware mod files, tools, repositories or install instructions on the forum and its official social channels, a policy first reported September 23. The company's stated reasons: insufficiently tested firmware can brick customers' units, interfere with future official updates, void warranty coverage, and expose Elektron's own intellectual property. Elektron specifically pointed to a "recent surge" of AI-assisted custom firmware, after mods had already surfaced for the Monomachine and the Octatrack MkII, and another mod, adding a metallic percussion machine to the Digitakt, appeared just a week before Model-TG.
General discussion of modding is still allowed on Elektronauts. What is banned is distributing the actual files or actively walking someone through installing them. Model-TG simply does that part somewhere else: a GitHub repository, outside Elektron's reach and outside the rule's wording.
Can a ban actually stop this?
Not by itself. Elektron can police its own forum, but it cannot police GitHub, Discord or the dozens of modding threads that already point there. What the ban does is push the activity off brand-owned turf and onto infrastructure nobody controls, which is exactly the pattern DIY hardware hacking has followed for decades, from Game Boy ROM hacks to car ECU tuning. The warranty and bricking risk Elektron names is real. So is the fact that a seventh sampler machine on a 329-euro six-track FM box is precisely the kind of feature a deep-tech or techno producer actually wants, and precisely the kind Elektron has never shipped.
