A supersaw is a big, wide lead or chord sound built by stacking many slightly detuned sawtooth waves into one broad, shimmering tone. It is the staple lead and chord sound of trance and big-room EDM, that bright, soaring wall of sound. Here is where it came from, how to build one, and the two things that make or break it: a solid low end and a tasteful amount of detune.
The method works on almost any synth with a saw wave and a unison mode, in any DAW or a browser instrument. None of it is tied to one product.
A supersaw is a big, wide lead or chord sound made by stacking many slightly detuned sawtooth oscillators into one broad, shimmering tone. Instead of a single thin saw, you get seven or more copies of it, each tuned a fraction apart so they beat against one another, spread across the stereo field so the ear hears one huge sound rather than separate notes. It is the staple lead and chord sound of trance and big-room EDM, the bright, soaring sound those styles are known for.
The name and the sound trace back to the Roland JP-8000, a synth from the late 1990s whose Super Saw waveform stacked seven detuned saws into a single oscillator. It caught on quickly, and today most synths offer a supersaw either as a ready-made waveform or as something you build yourself by turning up unison on a plain saw. Either way it is the same idea: one sawtooth, copied many times, detuned and widened. If the underlying trick is new to you, our guide on what is unison walks through the mechanism in full.
A supersaw is not really its own kind of oscillator. It is an ordinary sawtooth run through heavy unison, several copies detuned and spread. Some synths hand you a single control labelled supersaw that does the stacking for you, but under the label it is the same detuned saws you could build by hand.
You build a supersaw by taking a single sawtooth oscillator, turning its unison or voice count up to seven or more, adding detune so the copies spread in pitch and beat against each other, and spreading them across the stereo field for width. That is the whole recipe: a saw, stacked, detuned, and widened.
| Control | What it does | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|---|
| Voice count (unison) | Stacks copies of the saw. Seven or more gives the classic, full sound. | Seven is the JP-8000 number; add more for extra density |
| Detune | Spreads the copies apart in pitch so they beat and shimmer against each other. | Enough to shimmer, not so much it drifts out of tune |
| Stereo spread (width) | Fans the copies across the left and right of the stereo field for a wide image. | Wide up top, narrower as the sound goes low |
Start with the voice count, then dial the detune in by ear. A little already shimmers; push it too far and the stack drifts out of tune and turns sour, so keep it tasteful and back off the moment the pitch starts to feel unstable. Stereo spread is the finishing touch that turns a fat sound into a wide one, and it is best kept up in the mid and high range rather than down in the bass.
The most common supersaw mistake is too much detune. A wide stack is meant to shimmer, not to sound out of tune, so add detune slowly and stop while the pitch still feels solid. If a supersaw sounds sour or seasick against the rest of the track, the detune is almost always the reason, and pulling it back a little usually fixes it.
You keep the low end solid by layering a clean sub or a mono bass underneath the supersaw, because a stack of detuned, spread-out saws is thin and weak down low on its own. The very detune and stereo width that make a supersaw sound huge also scatter its low-frequency energy, so by itself it has almost no usable bass, and the wide sides can partly cancel when a system sums the two stereo channels to mono.
Put a simple sine sub or a mono bass under it, tuned to the root, and keep that layer centred and mono. That gives the track a firm foundation for the wide supersaw to sit on top of. As a rule, keep the width up in the mid and high range where it reads as big, and keep the low end narrow and mono so it stays solid on club systems, phone speakers and anything that plays back in mono. A quick check in mono before you commit will show whether the low end holds up or thins out.
You make a supersaw sit in a track by shaping it with a filter and placing it with reverb and delay, so it fills space without swamping everything else. Raw, it is very bright and very wide, which can crowd a mix, so a little shaping goes a long way.
Roll a low-pass filter down to tame the harsh top and set how bright the sound reads: open it more for a soaring lead, close it a touch for a softer chord bed. Reverb and delay then put the supersaw in a space and add depth, though a sound this wide usually needs less than you would expect, since too much blurs it into a wash. Because a supersaw already takes up so much of the stereo field and the upper harmonics, give it room by carving a little space with EQ or arranging the other bright parts around it so nothing fights. Played as a lead it follows the same rules as any other lead, which our guide on how to make a lead sound goes through in full.
A supersaw lives or dies on how its detune and stereo width are set, and both are far easier to judge by ear than on paper. Reading the recipe gets you the map; hearing a stack widen and shimmer while it plays is what makes it click.
ARGISH is a self-playing synthesizer. Set a mood and a key, build a progression on the chord wheel, and it composes and evolves in the background while you turn knobs and hear what they change, so you can listen to detuning and stereo width move in a real part rather than only read about them, which is the heart of a supersaw. It runs in your browser, or as a plugin in your DAW: an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX for Pro Tools and a standalone app.
You can hear it free in your browser first, no install and no account, then decide.
Everything on this page also works by hand on almost any synth with a saw and a unison mode, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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