When I was in the second, or third, grade, my class was tasked with writing a book report on a famous person. Randomly, my school library had a biography on the astronaut Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom. I was still at that impressionable age where the future was anything I could make of it, and naturally astronaut was going to be my career. As a result, I soaked up every word of this biography.

Weirdly, the thing that stuck with me the most, through decades of crushing reality, was that he named his Gemini capsule “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”. Years later, I would discover that this was in reference to a survivor of the Titanic, but the child me was enamored with this name. It was triumphant. It was victorious. It was just this side of ridiculous to tickle my fancy.

When it came time to build a new LFO, I was desperately trying to build something I could sync to a clock. After so many attempts to get one working, I finally gave up and built what I had breadboarded. Naturally, finally and inevitably, I had something worthy of carrying on the title “Unsinkable”.

Molly Brown is a triangle core oscillator, with various shaping functions to achieve simultaneous triangle, square, hump and serrated outputs with a CV-controllable waveshaper for weirdness.

While Molly Brown is a great free-range LFO, it still didn’t fill the “clock-syncable LFO” gap in my modular. Whilst poring over various schematics, something clicked deep in my ADHD brain and a realizations surfaced: I’d purchased a TAPLFO chip from Electric Druid over the summer, and never did anything with it. Now I had my syncable LFO and there was only one thing for it: Pay homage to the Mercury capsule that did sink, and nearly killed Gus Grissom in the process.

Liberty Bell 7 is a clock-syncable LFO with 16 waveforms, unipolar and bipolar functionality and switchable frequency multipliers–built on the Electric Druid TAPLFO3 chip.

Sadly, Gus Grissom died during a training accident that took the lives of the Apollo 1 team. He never got a chance to weigh in with his opinions on LFOs, synchronized or free range. He might never have cared whether or not my LPF sweeps in time with the sequencer, but that elementary school version of the Mechlabrat loved what he stood for and would have wanted to memorialize him in some small way.