Guitarist Mark M Thompson takes the Liquidsonics Seventh Heaven reverb plugin for an alternative, “off-road” test drive and ends up discovering there’s far more to this plugin than some may think.
Bricasti M7
The Bricasti M7 is one of the most revered studio hardware units ever manufactured: everyone knows what this gorgeous (and expensive) reverb is capable of and what it sounds like, and since 2018 musicians and producers have been able to run a version of it in their DAW courtesy of Liquidsonics’ Seventh Heaven plugin. Available in two flavours (standard and professional), Seventh Heaven has won just about every award going and in a short time become itself a highly regarded studio tool.
What LiquidSonic Claim
LiquidSonics make a bold claim;
“For years the Bricasti M7 eluded all attempts to capture and reproduce the subtle beauty of this legendary hardware. Many in the industry considered it impossible.
Fusion-IR is a unique modulated convolution-based capture and reproduction technology developed specifically around the needs of M7. It redefines the rules of acoustic and workflow possibilities for convolution based reverberation processors.
Now used around the world, from the smallest mountain-top backpack studios to the biggest post production facilities in London and Los Angeles, Seventh Heaven reverbs are the definitive way to experience the power and beauty of the M7 natively within your DAW.”
Signal Chain
The signal chain was very basic: my guitar plugged direct into Pro Tools, and then Nembrini’s awesome Clon plugin into IK Multimedia’s Amplitube 5 (the Fender 65 Twin as usual) making sure all other effects including, and most importantly, the room ambience module were bypassed. This was then sent to an aux channel housing Seventh Heaven, and aside from scrolling through the presets and the occasional switching of pickups on the Strat, absolutely no other changes were made whilst recording.
Skeptical about the hype
I’ll admit that I initially thought that the Seventh Heaven was going to be not much different to some of the impulse responses of the original hardware unit I had… I was wrong. Seventh Heaven is a stunning piece of kit, with all the control and editable functions you could want in a reverb (including the one I look for first: a tempo-synced pre-delay) and sound quality that’s just off the scale.
More than just reverb
After scrolling through the usual (albeit beautiful) halls and plates, I thought that it may be neat to try an alternative approach to demoing its capabilities and dial in a selection of the “interior room” presets that would normally be intended for sound design, and reverbs possibly not even heard by most using the original M7 unit.
Would this open up a whole new tonal palette for recording electric guitars? In a word, yes.
The sheer quality, depth and realism of the reverbs make it a truly inspiring tool as opposed to something that one would use purely for some basic dimension. I know I have only scratched the surface of what it can do, and will be digging deeper over the coming weeks.