It’s not often an instrument tells you what it is so blatantly. And perhaps there’s a reason for that, as SuperStarSaw is far more than the one-trick pony its name suggests.
It’s not uncommon for me to start a review with a disclaimer or controversial statement, so here goes: I really like SuperStarSaw… but not for its ‘super saw’ patches. And I’m not even sure that sound is the best reason to buy it. Still, let’s address the oscillator in the room…
Back in the mid 90s, a new kind of synth exploded into the market like a giant banging thing. Virtual Analogue used newly affordable digital chips to mimic older analogue synths… with more polyphony and stability.
And they offered new possibilities.
In 1996, Roland released the JP-8000. This pioneering synth featured a special oscillator slot, designed to stack up seven saw waves at wide detuning intervals.
This was possible because the JP-8000 featured dedicated computational headroom on the chip for seven saw waves in one oscillator slot, without taking away resources from the rest of the synth. Hence the name: supersaw.
It was thick, it was huge, and it came to define an entire era of trance music.
You could approximate supersaws in other VA synths by stacking up oscillators and voices and applying unison, but it wasn’t the same. And because competitors such as the Nord Lead, Access Virus, and Yamaha AN1X (the latter two of which I owned) didn’t allocate bandwidth for those extra waveforms, your polyphony tumbled fast.
And just one more thing to clarify before moving on... people often think ‘supersaw’ means a specific kind of patch. But it’s actually more useful to think of it as an oscillator type, as that’s how the JP-8000 treated it.
All of which brings us to SuperStarSaw.
What’s in a name?
The name is a pun, of course, which isn’t a good sine (see what I did there?).
SuperStarSaw revolves around supersaws and is designed by a producer who made his name with a track called Superstar (itself full of supersaws), who went on to work with superstars. Luckily, there’s more to this thing than wordplay.
Structurally, SuperStarSaw is very straightforward. To the left is the sound window, containing two voices, called ‘swarms’. Each delivers up to 16 saw waves and, unlike classic supersaws, lets you manually alter things like the number of saw waves, their tuning separation, and stereo spread, with additional controls for retriggering per note, swapping oscillator panning, and more.
Underneath are a bunch of sound-altering controls. You can have ‘motion’ modulation of spread, tuning and even the non-linearity of the stereo distribution of the waves. You can create pairs of waves, affect the mix of a tuned saw wave and its relatively detuned siblings, introduce amplitude variations to oscillators within swarms… and that’s before we even get to ways you can affect the dynamic tuning of the oscillators within each voice.
If that feels a bit overwhelming, fear not: most modules in SuperStarSaw have a dedicated randomiser function. Plus you can copy your setup from one voice to another with a single ded