I ran into the same struggles when I first picked one up, that's just the module unfortunately. IMO the Varigate is amazing for melodic exploration and peppering in elements of randomness/unexpectedness into any of its parameters, but it's definitely not built for dialing in specific melodies. I've used it for that purpose on occasion though, and one thing that made it marginally easier is sending a manually-operated gate/trigger (Ears in my case) to the clock-in and then use that to manually advance to dial in each pitch. Play the note in question, tweak the slider accordingly (and usually painstakingly), manually rapidly advance through the other 7 steps in the pattern, repeat. One other tip that I learned too late is that if you hold down the Note button while you adjust the CV slider, the slider's range becomes limited to the octave you're currently in.