A trash guitar?! MIDI bytes not going through! + Lots of docs! Near success!

I see you are using 3 x 7805 regulators for the strips (to protect them?) the input to the regs is 5V, but you are trying to pull 5v out of them. I think these regs require somewhat more than 5v input to give a stable 5vout (like 7v or something). I see what you are trying to do but wonder why you need 3 1A regs ?
If the overall resistance of the strip is 10k, the current flow will be <1mA, so you could easily run all three strips from one much smaller regulator.
Also powering from USB may also have its voltage instability, I have measured some at 4.4V where 5V has been expected. Perhaps if you ran the board from 6V cellpack or a small power supply over 5V to the Vin/RAW pin of the micro board it may help to stabilise things up a bit plus give you the overhead Volts you need for your 5V regulation to the strips :slight_smile: