The Score Magazine January 2020 | Page 46

KAUSTHUB RAVI & SIVANESH NATARAJAN NEW YEAR, Liquidsonics Seventh Heaven Plug-in Simulation Simplified The Bricasti M7 is held by many as the holy grail of reverbs. As someone who has one at the studio, I can vouch for this with absolute intent. It’s ability to stay clean and give the effect of absolutely being one with the signal never fails to impress. There have been many attempts to emulate this legendary box and we’ve been disappointed most of the time. The Seventh Heaven by Liquidsonics certainly changes that. We were first introduced to Liquidsonics through the Slate Bundle which had the Lustrous Plates which we were quite happy with. It comes in two versions - Professional and ‘standard’. We were quite happy with the limited controls of the standard as it allowed us to get to a place quicker. But the professional version offers a lot more versatility very similar to the real M7. The $69 regular Seventh Heaven offers 30 of “the best” preset from the M7 v1, with a hard drive footprint of just under 500MB. The controls are simple and have Mix and Gain along with the Preset knob notches the 30 presets within their six categories, Decay time. There's a little extra under with the ‘advanced panel’ which offers Early/Late balance and VLF level controls along with high cut and low cut filters. 44 The Score Magazine highonscore.com The professional comes with a whole lot more. 10GB of IR samples, all of the controls and parameters that the M7 v1 and v2 have and every single preset included. It includes a five- band Master EQ with Low and High cut filters, switchable High and Low shelving/ parametric peak filters, and a parametric Mid band. It's also a whole lot more expensive - 300$. The plugin is built on something called Fusion IR which in their own words, is a unique modulated convolution-based capture and reproduction technology developed specifically around the needs of M7. Whatever the tech is, it seems to have worked. The seventh heaven sounds fantastic! It's impossible to have it sound bad. You can just run an instance on a set of busses with a very low mix value and it just glues the entire mix together, very much like the real deal. It's incredibly responsive and smooth. The UI is wonderfully simple and good looking while keeping the nostalgia of the M7 in the whole look and feel of it with the red on black. The M7, while being insane, is sometimes quite hard to dial in with its myriad of controls and parameters. The standard version of the Seventh Heaven allows you to get the closest ever to the M7 without all the fuss. While the professional version is an absolute beast and is worth every bit of what you are paying for it, the standard version is a more fun-sized and easy user experience. In most cases honestly, it seems more than adequate.