Getting Started: Pitch Smart Crumb

If you didn’t know already, we have a range of new and exciting components to use with the Crumble: Smart Crumbs. If you don’t know anything about these yet, you can find out more here. In this post, we are going to focus on the Pitch Smart Crumb, which provides a simple and easy way of making music with your Crumble.

Smart Crumbs are just as easy to use as other Crumble components and after reading through this post, we’re sure you’ll be confident and raring to get stuck in making some retro-style music!

The Pitch Crumb, like all Smart Crumbs, requires a connection to power (+ and -) as well as a connection to an I/O port (A, B, C or D). For this example, we’ll connect it up to D, just because it makes our diagram easier to make!

Controlling the Pitch Smart Crumb, whilst still relatively simple, does pose a few more options compared to other Smart Crumbs. As Always, all of the relevant blocks are located within the ‘Smart’ tab.

There are two main ways that you can produce notes/tones with the Pitch Crumb. Either you can set the beats per minute (bpm) and then choose notes by name and duration, or you can choose to generate the tone using the frequency value (Hz), setting a duration by using a wait statement before stopping the note.

Let’s get ourselves started with a simple arpeggio – we’ll use the notes C – E – G – C, with each note lasting one beat at 60bpm.

If we wanted to create the same program, but using the frequency values instead, it would look something like this. You may find the notes to be ever so slightly different – this is because the true frequency of notes go into multiple decimal places, something which the Crumble cannot currently handle.

The main benefit of using the frequency block to manually select the notes we hear is that we can ‘generate’ more interesting sounds. Take this sound effect as an example. We’ve used the ‘random’ block to select the pitch of the note, as well as the length, providing us with sort of robotic loading sound.

The Smart Crumb: Pitch opens up an area which hasn’t existed on the Crumble before. Yes we’ve had buzzers providing a way of generating sound, but they can only produce one note. Now we are only limited by our hearing (roughly)! Welcome to the new world of simple melodies, doorbells, warning sirens, robotic voices and more!

We hope that this has covered the basics of how to use the Digits Smart Crumb, but if you do have any queries or questions, or you spot something that isn’t quite right feel free to get in touch! Get in contact with us via email, Facebook, X or our Forum and we may feature your work!