Liquidsonics’ Seventh Heaven was released 5 years ago. This is a plugin I didn’t know I needed until I tried it and its been a constant feature in my mixes ever since. Like many people I had more quality reverb plugins than I needed and as such I wasn’t particularly motivated to try it. I had the Exponential Audio reverbs, I’m still a fan of R4. Why would I be interested in yet another reverb? If you’re in a similar position or if you’re happy with your stock reverbs, here are some reasons you owe it to yourself to try Liquidsonics reverbs. And you should start with Seventh Heaven.

1 - It Sounds Great

It has to start here. If you think your current reverb sounds great, I’m sure it does. There are some great reverbs out there and pretty much everything is useable. The fact that spring reverb still exists in 2022 illustrates the fact that not all reverbs have to be lush and immersive. I was more than satisfied with my regular reverbs, but when I heard Seventh Heaven I started to reconsider that. All of the things you hear said about classic reverbs apply here. The reverb wraps itself around the sound in a very seductive way and never clashes with or obstructs the sound. I’d always gravitated towards Lexicon reverbs, I was using the PMC Native Reverb Bundle at the time so my experience of Lexicons wasn’t based on soundalikes but on the real thing but this reproduction of the supposedly unreproducible Bricasti M7 is something different and something very special. From claustrophobic ambiences to epic arenas, it’s all there.

2 - It’s Fast

Anyone who has ever enabled the automation for every parameter in a complex reverb plugin will know why that can be a bad move. Most of us do more harm than good when we take a really deep dive into reverb programming. Far more useful for the busy mixer is a good set of quality presets and quick access to the stuff which really makes a difference like decay time, early/late balance and HF rolloff. Seventh Heaven comes in two versions: Seventh Heaven and Seventh Heaven Professional. There are technical and pricing differences  between the two but the biggest difference is the number of parameters available in each. In Seventh Heaven Professional you have access to things like reflection patterns and decay time multipliers, whereas in Seventh Heaven your choices are more limited. On first glance it might look as if decay time isn’t accessible in Seventh Heaven but actually it is, just click and drag the numeric display. You only get 30 presets with Seventh Heaven but when they sound as good as this I see this as a strength. I have Seventh Heaven and Seventh Heaven Professional and I use them both as much as each other. I just see Seventh Heaven as ‘get a great reverb sound quickly” and Seventh Heaven professional as “get a great reverb sound and tweak some things to convince myself that I had something to do with it being as great as it is’!

3 - It’s Accessible

Seventh Heaven Professional is a fully featured reverb which behaves like an algorithmic reverb, even though the tech behind it is a little more complicated than that. It’s very easy to drive compared to many professional reverbs as it doesn’t present the user with endless choices, only some of which will be good choices. It’s hard to make this reverb sound bad. It costs $299, which is in line with other top tier premium plugins. The real story here however is Seventh Heaven. This plugin offers a reduced set of parameters, a reduced set of presets and a reduced set of sonic choices but it sounds every bit as good as Seventh Heaven Professional but only costs $69. That is such good value that I recommend it without reservation. It is just the best value plugin I know of anywhere. Get it. You’ll probably buy the Professional version if you do but that won’t be because you’re dissatisfied with Seventh Heaven, quite the opposite!

4 - Modulation And Convolution

At the heart of Seventh Heaven is Fusion IR. It is this which makes recreating the Bricasti M7 possible. The idea is simple enough. Convolution sounds very realistic and there is no better way to capture the character of an acoustic space. It’s like talking a photograph of the space’s sound. The problem is that convolution can’t capture changes which occur over time. Many classic hardware reverbs use modulation to add richness and it is beyond the capabilities of convolution reverbs to capture these changes over time in a single snapshot.

Fusion IR captures many individual impulse responses and uses them to recreate these modulations, in much the same way as a movie is a series of still photographs, Fusion IR is a combination of many Impulse Responses. This technique is the reason why Seventh Heaven sounds as good as it does.

5 - It’s A Bricasti

The Bricasti M7 was a pinnacle of hardware reverb design. Some of the better known hardware reverbs were from the earlier days of digital reverb. The Lexicon 224 was released in the late 70s and was an extraordinary achievement for the time. The Bricasti M7 was released in the late 2000’s and rather than being a progenitor of plugin reverbs it was actually competing with them! The sounds of Seventh Heaven are drawn from the first version of the M7 and the categories appended with a ‘2’ in Seventh heaven Professional are unique to the version 2 revision of the M7 and it is these which feature the modulations which the Fusion IR capture so faithfully. Rather than sounding amazing for the decade in which it was created, the M7 just sounds amazing.

6 - Three Reverb Engines

The M7 featured three discrete reverb engines, one for early reflections, which are denser and more convincing than in lesser reverbs, one for the tail, which being of different design to the conventional digital reverbs which preceded it doesn’t suffer from the coloration so common in other designs, and the VLF or Very Low Frequency engine which, as the name suggests is dedicated to the very bottom end. While this design is derived from the allocation of hardware resources in the original, it is an indication of the power of the original. An innovative design and a lot of power conspire to make this a reverb worth trying.

7 - It’s Just Been Updated

Seventh Heaven Professional has just been updated to version 1.4 bringing support for surround formats including Dolby Atmos up to 7.1.6. To celebrate its fifth anniversary Liquidsonics are offering a free copy of Seventh Heaven Pro 1.4 worth $299 every day until Tuesday 26th April 2022. Enter for free by clicking the button below. You only have to enter once, if you don’t win today you’re automatically entered for tomorrow’s draw.