16 step staircase clocked by seq (by the beat indicator dout pin)

Any easy way to do this? Some cmos counter thing and an r2r maybe?

Idea is this: I will have LEDs on top of all my buttons. Most of them will Correspond to the function of the button. But there are some functions that have a button, but no LED (like ff and rew)

To make them all look alike i want leds on those buttons as well, even though they´ll have no function. To make them look like something i thought about lighting those buttons dimmly. But even cooler would be this: Leds fading from dim to bright with every 16 steps. I would like that look…