Behind the synth: A. G. Cook on stacked sawtooths and the creation of Super*Saw

There are few sounds in electronic music and sound design as immediately recognizable as the stacked sawtooth wave. Emerging from the digital, virtual analog revolution of the 1990s, the supersaw became the driving force of rave anthems, euphoric pop, and wall-of-sound club music. Today, Native Instruments is proud to introduce Super*Saw (pronounced SuperStarSaw), a brand-new synthesizer co-created with visionary artist, producer, and PC Music founder A. G. Cook.

To celebrate the launch, we sat down with A. G. Cook at Baltic Studios in London to talk about his unique production philosophy, how he pushes digital instruments to their limits, and how Super*Saw condenses complex stacking workflows into a single, highly expressive instrument.

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Redefining a classic: the philosophy of Super*Saw

For A. G. Cook – whose decade-long run of boundary-pushing production includes extensive work with Charli XCX, solo releases like 7G and Apple, and his latest record, Britpop – creating his own software instrument was a long-held ambition.

“It’s funny having my own synth plugin,” Cook reflects. “It’s something that’s always been a bit of a goal of mine and kind of on the back burner. I’m always excited when I see artists make their own tools around a specific ideology they have.”

That ideology is rooted in taking established musical concepts and finding the unexplored boundaries. With Super*Saw, Cook wanted to celebrate the digital, hyper-layered legacy of the 1990s supersaw and twist it into something entirely new.

“I’ve really enjoyed building on the notion of the supersaw that was established in the 90s. A lot of instrument design is about taking things that exist in the world and changing the corners, the edges, or the limits of it. Thinking about what could be improved, or flipped on its head. You’re extending the family tree of a musical idea that was started a long time ago.”

Exploring extremes: minimal versus maximal

Cook’s music is famous for its stark contrasts. Whether he is crafting underground club tracks or global pop hits, his approach is defined by constant sonic experimentation and a refusal to fall into comfortable patterns.

“I find it hard to describe my own sound because I’m constantly trying to break it,” Cook says. “That’s what makes music interesting to me… a lot of the experimentation I’m doing in my own music is really to keep myself interested… just trying to stay engaged. In a way, that’s what I really love about making music on computers. Anything could happen, and it could happen very, very quickly.”

This tension between the precise and the chaotic is exactly what makes the sawtooth wave such a perfect canvas. A simple sawtooth wave is sharp, aggressive, and harmonically rich. But when you stack them, they morph into something massive.

“In my mind, the supersaw is an archetypal 90s invention, because it’s about moving from analog synths to digital virtual analog instruments that can suddenly load way, way more oscillators than you’d normally be limited to. We can make something that is much thicker,  weirder, more digital, and ultimately ravier. It’s essentially stacking saw waves to new heights.”

Across Cook’s catalog, you can hear this exact technique at play. On his track “Superstar,” the arrangement transitions from a delicate piano ballad into towering, detuned supersaw layers. On 7G, tracks like “Mad Max” push stacked saw waves so far that they stop sounding like chords entirely.

“The supersaws get so thick that they’re essentially percussion,” Cook explains. “At that point, it stops even being audible as a chord, and you just hear it as a block of sound.”

From tedious workarounds to intuitive workflow

Before developing Super*Saw with Native Instruments, achieving these complex, evolving textures meant setting up incredibly tedious DAW sessions. Producers had to duplicate tracks, manually automate fine-tuning, and coordinate multiple plugins to get the desired movement.

“Doing some of those more classic A. G. Cook-style supersaw sounds can sometimes be the slowest part of my process,” Cook explains. “I have a track called ‘Stargon’, where I was using all these different plugins, and their different detune functions to form a chord progression… but it was a real pain to get all the automation right and meticulously line everything up. So I was doing these long workarounds, and it never felt like I was playing the synths or interacting with them in a musical way.”

Super*Saw solves this problem by packing deep, expressive parameters into an elegant, playable interface. By limiting the synth entirely to sawtooth waves, the instrument forces you to focus on the pure creative potential of the stack.

The architecture features a dual 8-voice sawtooth oscillator system, divided into two highly distinct, color-coded visual layers: pink and green.

“I had a strong sense that it would be two layers, these two groups, because that’s often how I think about building sounds,” Cook says. “It’s almost like having a comedic duo. One half could be going crazy and the other half could be anchoring it with a fundamental note. It then became obvious that pink and green would stack really well while feeling distinct, so you have these two vivid, contrasting colour worlds.”

Inside the interface: shaping your sound

Super*Saw is built for real-time interaction. Rather than relying on static automation, you can use the 4-corner Morpher to smoothly transition between different chord shapes, detuning rates, and modulation states as you play.

In the video walk-through, Cook demonstrates how he builds a patch from scratch using the pink layer, slowly adding voices, adjusting the spread and width, and dialing in the motion control – a star-shaped modulator that can be mapped to panning, amplitude, or pitch.

“The nice thing is you can copy a pink layer to a green one, or you can just start randomizing the two of them. Clicking a dice – I love doing that kind of stuff.”

By blending a raw bassline on one layer with a shifting, modulated chord pattern on the other, Super*Saw moves seamlessly from pristine harmonies to beautiful, controlled grit.

The next chapter of the stack

For Cook, Super*Saw isn’t just a new tool – it represents a full-circle moment that connects his past discography with his future productions.

“This plugin is a sort of coda, epilogue, or final chapter to the albums that I’ve already released as A. G. Cook,” Cook concludes. “Not just the Britpop pink-and-green color scheme, but also the echoes of 7G and Apple’s sonic world. It feels more exciting than just making a big sample pack of all those sounds, to think about boiling that stuff down into an instrument that can be used by other people in completely different ways.”

Whether you want to write shimmering pop chords, heavy basslines, or wall-of-sound rave leads, Super*Saw gives you immediate, expressive control over the power of stacked sawtooth waves.

Get Super*Saw

Ready to explore the extremes of stacked sawtooth waves? Get Super*Saw today and start shaping your own unique soundscapes.

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