Native Instruments SuperStarSaw – Supersaw Synth, Now 60% Off

The supersaw is one of electronic music’s defining sounds — and one of its most tedious to build by hand. Layer a synth, detune it, layer it again, automate the spread, repeat until the session looks like a layer cake. SuperStarSaw, co-created with producer and artist A. G. Cook, collapses that entire ritual into a single playable instrument that stays expressive even when the sound gets extreme.

Two Swarm Engines Doing the Heavy Lifting

At the core sit two oscillator stacks called Swarms. Each Swarm starts with a fundamental saw wave and lets you add up to 16 further saw oscillators on top, with control over the pitch, pan and amplitude of the stack. That is up to 17 saws per Swarm, two Swarms per patch, all behaving like one instrument rather than a folder of tracks. Build the wide detuned walls trance is made of, tighten things into dense chord clusters, or lean into unusual atonal groupings that a conventional synth would never volunteer.

The XY Morpher: Movement Without Automation Lanes

The Morpher is an XY performance control that moves between sound states in real time. Ride it across a pad and the timbre reshapes itself under your hand; sweep it through a lead and the character mutates mid-phrase. It replaces lanes of painstaking automation with a single gesture, which means the movement actually gets performed instead of programmed — and performed movement is what separates a static stack from a living one. Contrasting settings become destinations rather than separate presets.

Modulation and Space, Built In

SuperStarSaw carries multiple modulation sources that can be assigned across the instrument: an LFO, two envelopes, mod wheel control and Voice Offset controls that add variation between individual voices, so repeated notes never land in exactly the same place. The effects section covers chorus, delay, reverb and glide — everything needed to take a dry stack into wide, spacious, evolving territory without leaving the plugin. Glide in particular turns those stacks into the sliding, euphoric harmonies the style runs on.

235 Presets and Room to Misbehave

The factory library runs to 235 presets aimed squarely at trance, hyperpop, rave and electronic production, so the first session is about playing rather than programming. From there the range runs from huge euphoric harmonies through metallic dissonance to controlled chaos, with the instrument staying playable at every point on that dial. It runs as VST3, AU and AAX on Windows 10 or 11 and recent macOS versions, Apple Silicon included, in a download of just 162 MB.

System Requirements

The instrument is a light install with modern requirements. On Windows it needs Windows 10 or 11; on macOS it runs on macOS 14, 15 or 26, with an Intel Core i5 or equivalent processor, or Apple Silicon, which it supports natively. Memory requirements are modest — 4 GB minimum, 6 GB recommended — and the download is just 162 MB, so it lands quickly and leaves your drive for sample libraries. An internet connection is required for installation and activation. Formats are VST3, AU and AAX, covering the major DAWs on both platforms, and because the synthesis is generated rather than streamed from disk, the modest footprint is not a compromise — it is simply what a purpose-built saw machine needs.

The Deal

At $39.99 against a $99 list price, SuperStarSaw is 60% off — forty dollars for the stack, already stacked. General-purpose synths can approximate a supersaw after an afternoon of layering; this does the iconic thing immediately, with performance controls the manual method cannot match. If your leads feel thin next to the records you love, this is the thickness, at a preset-pack price.