Ok to daisy chain the ground pin on multiple pots / LEDs?

[mattoverse]

My apologies as I am sure this has been covered here before, but could not find a clear answer after a search of forum posts.

I am working on an 8 step 4017 based sequencer and am curious if I can daisy chain the grounds on the 8 frequency pots together, the same question the the 8 step indicator LEDs?

If this is not a problem, it would save me having to find space for 16 ground connections on my board and reduce that number to 2.

Beyond that, where would one run into trouble daisy chaining grounds vs. running ground wires from each offboard component?

[R.G.]

The answer is complicated.
1. How much current flows to/from the parts being grounded?
2. How much resistance does the wire/copper traces have?
3. Do any audio components share a wire/copper path with the non-audio parts?
4. How much gain is involved after the audio components share the path?

The short answer is that in pedals, you generally get away with just hooking all of them together - until you don't. Pedals are small, wires are short (and hence low-ish resistance) and currents are low, so often it is fine however you do it. But there is a steady stream of questions here involving why does my pedal click, my LFO tick, and occasionally why signal bleeds through in bypass. Many of those are cases where the 'get away with it' breaks down.

LEDs involve large (for pedal circuits) currents. It's usually best to keep their ground current off the same wires as, for instance, tone, volume, and gain controls.

[mattoverse]

Thanks R.G., I very much appreciate you taking the time to respond.  Unfortunately, I am afraid I don't know enough to answer those questions very well in this case.

I am using a simple 40106 oscillator as the clock input to the 4017, then using 8 steps of the 4017 as the sequencer run into a 4046 for audio output.
The LED grounds I want to potentially tie together are the indicator lights for each step I am using of the 4017.  This goes as well for the frequency pots connected to each step of the 4017.

[R.G.]

We can make some guesses. Your circuit separates into two sections, non-audio and audio. The oscillator/clock, 4017, and LEDs are all non-audio. They control an input into a 4046. You're using the 4046 vco output directly, is that correct?

If so, the indicator lights and speed control for the oscillator can be bussed together. They're not sensitive to tiny, tiny offsets and signals.

It's not clear how the 4017 outputs are used for the 4046. Do they enable a resistor divider or some such into the VCO's control input?

Given that all of this seems to be working with high signal levels and not much gain for the audio, it's possibly one of those applications that you just get away with. Got more details of how the 4017 goes to the 4046?

[mattoverse]

Each step output of the 4017 goes into pin 3 of a potentiometer with pin 2 going across a diode to the "signal in" on the 4046, the output of the 4046 is then fed into a 2 pole active sallen key style low pass resonant filter one side of a standard dual opamp.