Has anyone tried any big shift registers?

[slacker]

I've got a pair of 4 bit shift registers in my Lunetta already and I'll probably add another one, possibly a CD4034 hooked up like a mini Klee.
I was wondering about experimenting with some larger shift registers though like the CD4517 which has up to 128 stages with various taps. Has anyone tried anything like this before?
I'm thinking it would be interesting for creating long repeating patterns or potentially you could use to to create very short delays in audio rate streams.

[Rykhaard]

[Psyingo]

I've used the 4031, which is a 64 bit shift register, i orriginally got it to program 64 step drum patterns, but have since started using it as a buffer override kind of effect. the 4031 is neat since it has a 'recycle' input, which when high disconnects the data input and reroutes the output back into the in. so i have it clocked fairly high, and i use it to process external signals,like from a drum machine. i have a pretty complex mechanism set up for triggering when it will go high or low, but it is synchronised with the incoming audio, do that however you wish. but whenever it recieves a high signal, the 4031 acts as a memory with whatever 64 bits were flowign through it from the drum machine or whatevr input, at the time. if you clock in maybe the 10khz range or somethnig, you get a bitcrushed bufferoverride. its really quite awesome. i plan to make stand alone units that use this idea, but with much larger shift registers (several 64bits ganged, maybe 256?) once you play around with this, you'll wish you had bigger shift registers.

[ezekiel]

[Psyingo]

for useful processing of audio signals it would give you a tiny fraction of a second 1/30 or seomthing. depends on what kind of signals you want to beworking with and how low you would accept the sampling rate.

[slacker]

Interesting stuff Psyingo, thanks for posting that. I thought the 4031 looked interesting, I haven't been able to find any cheap anywhere yet though.

[JovianPyx]

I'm a little late to this party, but one can make some very nice noise with shift registers and XOR gates. The circuit is called a Linear Feedback Shift Register or LFSR. I've done this with an FPGA (but it can be done quite easily with CMOS shift register ICs) and found 64 bits to be quite sufficient to give nice noise when filtered and a shift register of 64 bits won't repeat like older 8 bit units. Of course - it does repeat, no matter how many bits are used, but the more bits, the longer the time to repeat. Each additional bit doubles the time to repeat given a constant clock rate.