We continue our free video tutorial series, brought to you with the support of LiquidSonics, in which we share a range of bite-sized reverb mixing tips for you to try in your next mix. In this article, we explore the Very Low Freq Reverb control in the LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven reverb.

What Is Very Low Frequency (VLF) Reverb?

The Seventh Heaven reverb plug-ins recreate the sounds of the Bricasti M7, which had a Very Low Frequency reverb control, which provided a fuller-bodied sound to the reverb, especially useful when used as a drum reverb. To help understand what VLF is all about there is a very useful explanation on the LiquidSonic’s website…

“The very low-frequency reverb in an M7 is magical. Whether it’s for mixing drums in pop or subtly supporting the articulation of legendary scoring stages in cinematic ensembles, it’s one of those things in life that does its job incredibly well but just gets out of the way. It’s doing something other reverbs simply can’t do. Specially designed to robustly support the low end, in short, reverbs and without swamping longer tails, it grows and shrinks nonlinearly with main reverb time in a totally unique way.”

We also reached out to LiquidSonics for further M7 and VLF insight:

“One of the points I would be keen to emphasise is that in M7 it is a dedicated low-end reverb, not built into the main reverb as most traditional low boosts are. That means M7 has complete control over its length, so it’s not just tied to the size or decay time of the main verb. That means it’s possible for them to boost the length a little when reverb times are short giving a really full and rich low end. Conversely, a regular low boost will end up swamping reverb when the tails are long because you add a ton of extra energy in the low end that would then swamp the reverb unless cut out again with low reverb time multipliers or other types of filters. Too much low end will rumble on unnaturally, missing the point of just supporting the body. If you try filtering out the very low end of reverbs (I’m thinking 100hz and down) it has a certain way of losing the life of the verb, so extra attention there was justified.

In the Seventh Heaven products, the low end was sampled individually to be sure the truest version of the modulated sound of that M7 component was accurately captured and reproduced. Also, no other product like LiquidSonic’s VerbSuite or Reverberate has dedicated control over the low reverb level, so it’s a unique point of differentiation.”

In This Tutorial

The Very Low Freq Reverb control in Seventh Heaven can sound a tad subtle. if you find it to be too subtle for your tastes, then try beefing up the tone of your reverbs using the built-in EQ, as we show in this free video tutorial using a snare example.