Design Your Super Saw Lead Sound

The "Super Saw" sound emerged in the 1990s and significantly rose in popularity during the early 2000s. It became widely used in many musical genres, such as Trance, Future Bass, and Progressive House. In the following tutorial, we will guide you on how to design your super saw lead from scratch.

As usual, we'll listen to the short sequence created in our SoundBridge: DAW, which contains most of the entire mix's elements.

~Full Mix - (Unprocessed)

What is a Super Saw Sound?

The Super Saw waveform is a unique form within the realm of waveforms. The structure features a group of sawtooth oscillators, each having slightly detuned compared to the others. Typically, this particular style of synthesizer sound exhibits a distinctive sharp buzzing character. Nevertheless, it does not possess a thin quality and instead produces an intense and wide sound, making it well-suited for pads or leads. Let's see how we can design this sound from scratch in Vital.

We have made a chord progression in the MIDI editor of a newly created channel in SoundBridge: DAW, and this is how it sounds with the initial preset from Vital.

~Super Saw - Solo (Initial Preset)

How to Design Your Super Saw Lead

To make our Super Saw sound wide, we need to use all three oscillators in Vital and additional white noise from the sample section. We will begin by increasing the unison voices for the first two oscillators to 16, but the detune amount for each will be low, around 20%. The third oscillator's unison will be left at default, serving as a base mono sound. We will add a small amount of white noise to cover the top frequencies of the sound spectrum.

To further detune the overall sound, we will modulate the fine-tuning of the first two oscillators with LFO 1 and slightly change the values in the fine-tuned sections. Finally, we'll activate the filter and automate the cutoff frequency later. Let us hear how it sounds so far.

~Super Saw - Solo (Oscillators & Filter)

The last step in improving our sound will be to activate the filter section. As you can see, we began with a small amount of chorus. Following that, we'll add some soft clip distortion. Next, we'll use the EQ to polish the signal before it is sent to the delay and reverb, which adds space and movement to the overall sound. We'll finish by automating the filter's cutoff parameter and then hear the final Super Saw solo and also in the context of the entire mix.

~Super Saw - Solo (Effects)

~Full Mix - With Super Saw Sound

If you liked this article on sound design, here are some more on the same subject:

• Design Your Deep House Lead
• Create an Atmosphere With a Simple Arp
• Add an Extra Texture to Your Melodies
• Use The Trance-Gate Effect to Alter the Rhythm of Your Instruments