Native Instruments SuperStarSaw is a new Synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows that lets you creatively explore supersaw sounds.
Supersaw sounds originated in the late 1990s with the Roland JP-8000 and became an essential part of electronic music, especially in trance. Last year saw the release of several JP-8000 emulations, including a free ROM-based version.
Native Instruments has now discovered the supersaw. But not in an authentic emulation. In collaboration with A.G. Cook, Native Instruments has just released SuperStarSaw, a new Synthesizer that lets you explore the supersaw wave in new ways.
Native Instruments SuperStarSaw
SuperStarSaw is a new Synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows in collaboration with A.G. Cook. The GUI is quite minimalist with a few contrasting elements. It’s a bit unusual at first glance and takes some getting used to.
According to Native Instruments, SuperStarSaw grew out of a two-year collaboration with their design team, who worked directly from Cook’s patches and production sessions to turn one of modern pop’s most coveted sounds into something you can actually play.
On the left side, you have the oscillator, more precisely oscillator banks. Each oscillator features a bank of 16 saw waves with various ways to mangle and reshape them, turning them into swarming generators.
You can set the number of saws, spread them, adjust the width, and change the retrigger. An internal randomizer allows you to randomize the configuration.
A SuperSaw Playground
Additionally, you shape them with the dedicated pan, amp, and motion sections. This allows each supersaw oscillator to develop a very unique character, ranging from rich static to highly dynamic.
Pitch is also very adaptable per swarming oscillator block. Of course, you can do the basic detuning to the entire swarm. This also has an internal motion engine to animate the detune, giving you an instant wobbly nature. But it goes further!
Create pairs of oscillators within the swarm using the symmetry function, quantize the pitch of them, or even form chords. There are many possibilities to connect the 32 saw waves into different swarms, always with distinct personalities.
In the middle section, you also adjust the pitch and pitch bend independently for each oscillator bank. Tweak the pitch bend to achieve beautiful swarming pitch movements.
The voice glide panel is hidden on a second page in the middle. Here, you can adjust the glide per voice plus voice offsets, giving you liquid smears and stereo motion that is central to A.G. Cook’s sound design approach.
Alongside this, it comes with a multimode filter (2- or 4-pole LP, BP, and HP) as well as built-in chorus, delay, and reverb. On the modulation side, it has an amp envelope, two auxiliary ADSR envelopes, and a multi-wave LFO that can be freely assigned.
Morphing
The 4-corner morphing engine is fun. Each corner has a capture function that lets you photograph its parameter settings. Once this is done in all four corners, you can seamlessly morph between four different parameter states without clicks or pops.
However, the option to mine them, as with Massive X, is missing, which is a real shame. To keep everything musical, the Native Instruments SuperStarSaw also has a global tune function and the ability to quantize the entire engine to a specific scale.
NI ships the plugin with various factory patches that let you move from rich harmonies to metallic dissonance, ravey leads to impossible glides, euphoria to tension, all from the same sound source
First Impression
NI kindly gave me the opportunity to preview the plugin, which is why the article is a bit more in-depth. It’s an interesting instrument, certainly a special-interest synth. For the supersaw fans.
The idea of flipping your Supersaws into swarms that are moving, not just fixed, is really exciting. I would also say that some of these parts can also be done with other modern synths that have advanced supersaw generators. But not that intensive
A major drawback, and I can’t understand why this still needs to happen in 2026, is the lack of GUI scaling. This is certainly one of the most unique and original Supersaw synth releases of the last years.
Native Instruments SuperStarSaw is available now for $99/99€. It runs as a VST3 and AU plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows.
More information here: Native Instruments
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