Design Your Own Super Saw Sound

The Super Saw synth sound became popular in the 90s with the Roland JP 8000 synthesizer. At its core, it's a waveform consisting of numerous sawtooth waves stacked on each other. This type of sound is frequently used for lead and bass in modern electronic music genres, such as Trance, EDM, and Future Bass. It produces a characteristic buzzing sound similar to a conventional sawtooth in the sharpness of the treble. However, it's much more fat in the bass. Nowadays, it's easy to create a sound like this with modern software synths. We will show you that process in the following tutorial. As usual, we have prepared a short sequence inside our SoundBridge: DAW. It contains a rhythm section and a bassline. Let's have a quick listen.

~Full Mix - Without Super Saw

To create the Super Saw, we have chosen Massive by Native Instruments. Regardless, you can use many other options for software synths. Now, we will write a chord sequence that follows the bassline. Let's see how it sounds with the default preset.

~Massive Chord Sequence - Default preset

Now, let's set some parameters on the oscillator section to the interface's left. As you can see from the picture below, we have used all three available oscillators and one modulation oscillator, which modulates the phase of oscillator no. 1. Lastly, we will also use the noise oscillator to add white noise on top of all the saw waves. Here is how it sounds so far.

~Massive Chord Sequence - All Oscillators

Detune Slightly for a Super Saw Sound

The most important within Massive, which turns an ordinary saw waveform into a Super Saw, can be found under the "Vo" icing section" "in the center of the interface. Here, we will increase the unison voices to eight and engage the "P" tch Cutoff" "ab. Then, move the fader to the right slightly in order to make the voices slightly detuned. We will engage the "P" n Position" for a wider stereo spread. This is set by default to the center or mono. Let's move the slider to the left. You can see all the settings in the picture below. 

Now, let's hear where we got with our Super Saw sound.

~Massive Chord Sequence - All Oscillators  + Unison

Lastly, we will finalize our Super Saw sound by adding reverb. Also, we will add polish by boosting some mid and high frequencies with the built-in EQ. Let's hear the result solo and then in the context of the mix.

~Massive Chord Sequence - All Oscillators  + Unison, Reverb and EQ

~Full Mix - With Super Saw