Okay, I'm opening the floodgates on writing up pending and future projects, until the point at which I've actually accomplished something and can write about it in retrospect. There's light at the end of the tunnel in regards to repair content, only time will tell..


In the last few months I've returned attention to the MIDI realm, instrumentation I've ignored to varying degrees since roughly 2004-5. In the intervening era my primary sound focus has been free form walls of electrical drone and noise, exploiting a fair amount of old tube electronics and manually operated gear in my work.
Bridging these two entirely separate domains has been a kernel I've been quietly chewing on for the duration. Today's instrument under consideration is the IVL 7000 mark 2 Pitchrider, a guitar to MIDI interface from the earlier half of the 1980s.


Here is, so far as I have been able to gather, the pin configuration of the 8 pin DIP input jack. This is far easier to see blown up...


Looks like a CD4051BE on each input channel, note the differing resistor stacks. Two of each channels feed a single P8031AH.

Since the CD4051BE purports to tolerate 20v P-P analog or 3-20V digital input, I'm not too concerned over feeding this thing line level in lieu of a standard guitar pickup level.


The patch backup battery is a CR2032 in a battery holder, absolutely dreamy compared to the internal backup batteries I'm use to seeing.

So the primary idea here is to translate (6x) signal frequencies into MIDI note data out, paving a path from raw sound to sequence data. Having no manual to reference I can only speculate what sort of MIDI data is supported; I'm hoping that each string input can be assigned a different MIDI channel output, and that signal amplitude will output as channel pressure. Since this is a pretty early device I'm not losing myself to optimism.