Native Instruments has released SuperStarSaw, a synthesizer co-created with Grammy-winning A. G. Cook. The British producer and PC Music founder has worked with work with Charli xcx, Beyoncé, Caroline Polachek, and Oklou. Supersaws, multiple sawtooth waves layered and slightly detuned against each other, are responsible for some of modern pop’s most immediately recognizable textures with a wide, lush, and harmonically dense quality. Building them has always meant painstaking multi-instance layering, a process Cook had refined over years of his own production work, and which became the starting point for what followed. The instrument grew out of a two-year collaboration with Native Instruments’ 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.
Native Instruments SuperStarSaw
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At its core are two independent 16-saw oscillator banks. A 4-corner X/Y Morpher captures four distinct patch states and allows continuous interpolation between them, turning what would otherwise be extensive automation into a single performance gesture. Musical constraint tools including chord, scale, and quantize keep harmonic exploration usable at all times, with controlled off-grid
deviation for intentional dissonance. Per-voice glide and offset controls handle the liquid smears and stereo motion central to Cook’s sound design approach.
“I’ve always been interested in sounds that can flip between harsh and beautiful, so our main goal was to create something as expressive as possible, that could turn itself inside out with a single click or drag. We used a lot of my own experiments as a starting point, but didn’t stop until it felt like its own instrument, with its own unpredictable musical outcomes. I’ve used it in countless sessions while developing the plugin and haven’t ended up making the same thing twice.” — A.G. Cook
SuperStarSaw ships with a wide preset library covering blissed-out harmonies, metallic dissonance, ravey leads, and impossible glides. Built-in chorus, delay, and reverb sit alongside LP, BP, and HP filters at 2-pole and 4-pole slopes. Mono/poly switching covers leads, basses, stacks, and chords without plugin hopping. The instrument integrates with Komplete Kontrol keyboards and Maschine.
Includes logo and morpher design work by Cook’s long-time visual collaborator Simon Whybray.
