ideas as well

ive also found an imterestimg cmos ic. : the cd 4066 quad switch. basicly it 4 switches integrated into one small 14 pin dip ic. you ask how this may be useful? i ll explain.. say you have a row of triggers with physical switches. you have to drill holes for everyone and wire everyone and have faceplate realeastate for each one. thats all well and cool, but depending on how much money u want to spend.. can be costly and time consuming depending on style of switch.. so ive been thinking of this chip for a drum programmer unit. basicly a large trigger sequencer with a ton of rows for triggering drums and envs or whatever. say 4-8 rows depending. so i can have one row of 16 step switches (like the 808-909) and then selelct between the instrument rows for their use. the only issue im trying to solve is one of power to that row after selection is done..

the chip uses and the vdd volatge as the on status for the switch input and the vss voltage (or lack of) for the off. basicly system power and ground. mine would be +12 an ground in this case. i guess i can just switch the power from another source to "hold" the stauts of each switch after i remove the row from the programmer circuit. like a "lock" switch. another issue is that upon powering down all sequences will be lost. but it would enable me to put all of this into say 3 or 4 rack spaces then for 8 rows of gates and triggers. one row of programmer switches (reeeeeal nice ones) and then a 4-8 x 16 grid of leds that correspond to each rows triggering status and one row of counter "current step" leds. just an idea....

also this would involve me going one more step into all of this stuff and etching my own boards. it would only be wise to do this for such a large amount of ic wiring and repeating circuits. and size as well. im working on how to make each row independant lengths and modes as well. (bi directional, reverse, random etc) it would be a seriously ridiculous analog drum programmer unit, that would be super original.