Using a guitar to enter notes into a sequencer has been a goal of mine for quite some time. I have a patch on the Empress Zoia but the pitch detection is not great. With this patch on miRack, I have been using a sample as the sound source so I am not sure how it will react to a guitar or bass. I will keep working on it.

But this patch is a proof of concept. I have used tuner modules to detect the tone and HOT TUNA also has a pitch-to-CV section so it outputs a CV to a pitch shifting module that works with CV. I have that going into two daisy chained shift registers. Each shift registers has its own 8 outs feeding into 8-to-1 sequential switches. I knew I could get 8 notes to play or even make chords with two parallel sequences and the notes played by the instrument in real time after the sequencer has been populated.

But I wanted 16 steps and was having a hard time thinking about how I could count to 8 and have that change the sequential switch to the other one. There were rising and falling edges which plagued my mind. So I just went ahead and added the modules to see what would happen.

The. It came to me that I could add another sequential switch with the proper CV at the correct step and have the clock sequence that runs the whole thing step through this as well. The change in CV toggles the two step sequential sequential switch – success!

If you want to use this yourself using a guitar or another external sound source, add an Audio In module. Take note of the triggers used to accept notes.