How to Supersaw
The supersaw is one of the most commonly used and essential sounds to happy hardcore, so let's make some! I'll start with 3xOsc, which is a super simple synthesizer in FL Studio, before moving on to more powerful synthesizers.First, behold the humble sawtooth wave:
The sawtooth wave, or "saw", is one of the four basic oscillator shapes that pretty much every synth is going to have. A supersaw, at its heart, is a bunch of saw waves playing at the same time while slightly out of tune from one another.
We're going to use the fine tune knob in 3xOsc here to slightly detune our save waves. I'm going to enable all 3 oscillators in this 3xOsc and detune them by plus or minus 2 to 15 cents each. Then I've added a second 3xOsc and did the same with them. In total, six saw waves, all slightly detuned (except one which can stay tuned, as long as it's the only one). That sounds like:
Okay something still sounds off. What's happening here is that while all of the saw waves are detuned, they all start at the exact same position in their waveform. That gives it the sort of "pop" sound at the beginning. We don't want that.
Luckily, 3xOsc has a "Phase Rand" dial, which allows each oscillator to start at a random point on its waveform instead of at the start. Let's turn that all the way up.
And there it is, a supersaw!
...yeah we can do a lot better than this.
Supersaw in Sylenth1
Sylenth1 is a classic synth plugin, it's been used in tons of songs and is just a great all around synth. I made music with it as my only synth for years. While it's great for all sorts of things, it absolutely slays at making supersaws! It's super easy to make incredible sounding supersaws with, so let's make one! Starting off on the init preset...
"voices" is the number of saw waves, which I've turned to as high as it will go, I've turned off "retrig" which does the same thing as turning phase rand up in 3xOsc did, and "detune" controls how detuned each saw wave is and I've adjusted it until it sounds right.
This is good, but we can go farther!
Sylenth1 has 4 oscillators, so let's use all of 'em! I'm doing the same thing to the other three that I did to the first, but with a different detune value for each oscillator.
Let's add some fx to it. I've enabled the "EQ", "Delay", "Reverb", and "Compress" effects. Everything at the default is fine, but I've adjusted the EQ to make it boost only the high frequencies to make the supersaw brighter.
This is a perfectly good supersaw but we're making happy hardcore. One really common trick to make supersaws brighter and happier is to set at least one of the oscillators to be an octave higher than the others.
Whenever I do this I usually use fewer, but more detuned voices in the higher octave oscillator. It just sounds nice to me, feel free to experiment!
One last tweak. This supersaw is very "wide" and stereo. This is good and cool but unfortunately if it ever gets squashed down to mono it might not sound so good. Luckily there's an easy fix for this, and we can turn the stereo knob on the oscillators down. I generally make the lowest pitch or least detuned oscillator have the lowest stereo value, with higher or more detuned oscillators be wider.
Okay cool but I don't have Sylenth1
Vital is a super cool synth you can get for free and also make supersaws with. The process is similar to Sylenth1, with a few terminology changes.
the "unison" section the red arrow is pointing at is the number of saw waves. the green arrow is pointing at the detune section, and the blue arrow is pointing to the tuning, with 12 being one octave up.
Slap some fx on it...
And now you know how to make supersaws!
Cool people
These people helped with information for this page, thank you!- Ranzor: Proofreading and advice