Native Instruments’ SuperStarSaw is A. G. Cook’s way of showing you the power of a simple saw wave
The humble saw wave has put in a serious shift over the years. Buzzing away inside Reese basses and Hoovers, it’s the basis for countless synth patches, including the massive, euphoric supersaws that have powered decades of dance music.
First popularised by the Roland JP-8000 and later baked into the DNA of trance, the supersaw is having yet another moment in the spotlight thanks to SuperStarSaw, a collaboration between Native Instruments and Grammy-winning producer A. G. Cook.
Best-known to many listeners as Charli XCX’s right-hand man, Cook’s production calling cards have slowly seeped into the charts since he founded the PC Music label in 2013. SuperStarSaw makes his signature sounds more attainable than ever – but can this synth do more than merely mimic its architect?
What do SuperStarSaw’s presets sound like?
Before I’ve even made any noise, SuperStarSaw’s unique appearance primes me to expect something different. It borrows the pink-and-green geometric design language from Cook’s Britpop album campaign, wrapped up in a one-page layout that feels clean and approachable at first glance.
SuperStarSaw interface. Image: Press
I’m particularly intrigued by the floral Morpher that takes centre stage, though other controls like the amp envelope and filter section feel impractically small. A resizable interface would be useful here.
Native Instruments has clearly lavished attention on the look of the plugin – but how does SuperStarSaw actually sound? I rifle through its 235 presets beginning to end, and am impressed with the instrument’s range. Several evoke specific moments from Cook’s eclectic discography: glassy glissando keys, dense flurries of plucks, aggressively pitch-enveloped percussive stabs. Others tread closer to classic—if slightly generic—dance sounds.

The quantity and quality of cinematic patches is a pleasant surprise, though it makes sense given Cook’s recent move into scoring with The Moment, a mockumentary film starring Charli XCX. But where synth-heavy soundtracks like Drive and Blade Runner 2049 are inspired by sounds of the past, SuperStarSaw’s character feels notably future-facing. At its most restrained, it deals in intimate ambient timbres; moments later, it’s churning out the sound of a spaceship at warp speed.

Designing sounds in SuperStarSaw
For the uninitiated, a supersaw stacks many slightly detuned saw waves to create a thick, drifting sound used for enormous leads and euphoric pads.
In SuperStarSaw, these stacks are presented as two independent ‘swarms’ of 16 oscillators each. Initialising the patch, I begin with the basics and dial up the Spread – this represents the range of detuning applied across the oscillators, and thus how big the sound is.

There are quite a few parameters to get your head around. They’re compartmentalised by function: the panning controls, for example, spread the oscillators across the stereo field, while the amplitude controls adjust their balance.
How they alter the sound is not always obvious by ear alone, but I’m assisted by a handy visualisation of the oscillators’ distribution around the root note, while tooltips along the bottom further ease the learning process.
SuperStarSaw Swarm Controls. Image: Press
Eventually, I become impatient with my results and discover the Randomise button. It’s definitely a gamble, with a frustratingly low hit rate for sounds I’d actually put in a track – many are devoid of harmony until tweaked substantially, and a few are almost inaudible altogether. A way to constrain ranges or lock parameters would help tremendously.

As I continue tweaking, I find myself treading a delicate balance: push too far, and the patch becomes cacophonous. While these sounds are fun to play with, they probably won’t work for melody-driven composition.
SuperStarSaw’s harmony engine
The antidote to all this amorphous discord is the harmony engine. At the basic level, it filters incoming MIDI according to a wide variety of scales: familiar options like major and minor, modal flavours including Super Locrian and Dorian #4, or the traditional Japanese Hirajoshi.
SuperStarSaw Scales. Image: Press
To access the harmony engine’s full power, I enable pitch quantisation within the oscillator swarm – this is where SuperStarSaw starts to open up. Each oscillator is ushered into the chosen scale’s confines, creating beautifully tense tone clusters as I increase the Spread:

Pitch quantisation can also be applied by way of a specific chord shape. I automate this parameter and play a single note, again in C major:

Finally, I rhythmically mash my MIDI keyboard, letting SuperStarSaw herd my playing into the Aeolian scale, before I finesse the initialised patch into a delicate, sparkly pluck:

Morphing and motion in SuperStarSaw
So, what actually makes something sound like A. G. Cook? According to the man himself, it’s “a lot of extreme contrast, minimalism, maximalism, finding ways to use those together in an expressive way”.
It follows, then, that SuperStarSaw’s Morpher is the instrument’s centrepiece. Using the snapshot buttons in each corner, users can instantly assign parameter values to the grid and transition between them gradually or dramatically:

I take a cue from Cook, configuring a simple fifth to break down into unwieldy chaos that’s rebuilt as an airy, fluttering pad:

This might be SuperStarSaw’s standout feature. Assigning macros to this many parameters—let alone automating them by hand—would be incredibly time-consuming. Instead, the Morpher makes gesture-based experimentation both speedy and fun.
Elsewhere, life can be injected into your patches through Motion settings within the swarm controls, along with an LFO and two ADSR envelopes that can be assigned to most parameters.
Sadly, the Morpher is excluded. It can be moved manually or automated in the DAW, but there’s no onboard LFO or path recorder to send it drifting around the grid – a missed trick for SuperStarSaw’s most potent sound design tool.
Should I buy SuperStarSaw?
If you’re yet to buy an all-purpose synthesizer, SuperStarSaw probably isn’t for you. Its architecture is unusual, and it doesn’t teach or cover the ‘standard’ synthesis workflow in the way a conventional do-it-all flagship like Serum 2 or Arturia Pigments does.
That said, SuperStarSaw is neither a toy nor a gimmick. It’s a focused, characterful instrument for producers who want to see just how far the supersaw can be pushed.
The more I use SuperStarSaw, the more I’m reminded how much mileage there is in a simple starting point, and its limitations force a different way of working. It’s potentially valuable for sound designers looking to break away from their usual habits or go-to patches.
This approach is not without flaws. With more conventional synthesizers, you can start with a sound in your head and build towards it through a fairly linear process. SuperStarSaw doesn’t always work like that, at least not until you’ve spent serious time with it. As a result, achieving something specific sometimes feels harder than expected.
There’s also a risk of sameness. Unless I fully engage in the sound design process, SuperStarSaw nudges me towards familiar territory, revealing a sort of ‘default’ character – but with a little patience, it’s possible to coax a broad palette from the instrument. This exploration is rewarding: it feels like you’re often just one tweak away from discovering something genuinely striking.
Given its narrower focus, SuperStarSaw does feel slightly expensive. But each time I load it up, I end up with a patch worth building a track around within minutes. For many, that creative spark is worth the £90 asking price.
Key Features

Two independent ‘swarms’ of 16 saw oscillators
235 presets across eight categories
Parameter randomisation buttons
XY pad for morphing between sounds
Quantise oscillator pitches to scales and chords
Independent per-voice glide
1 LFO / 2 ADSR modulation sources
High-pass, low-pass and band-pass morphing filter
Built-in chorus, delay, and reverb effects
Snap note input to chosen key and scale

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