What is a super-saw oscillator?
First a little bit of history. The Roland JP-8000 synthesizer was released in the mid 1990’s as part of the first wave of virtual analogue modelling hardware synthesizers (or VA synths).
One of the types of oscillator was the so called “Supersaw Oscillator”.
This relied on one sawtooth oscillator which was fixed to the centre frequency of the note being played, say standard A or 440 Hz. There were six other oscillators which were all slightly de-tunable, however the frequency ratio between the oscillators was always a fixed proportion (except when used with no detuning or in the “unison” mode). These super-saw oscillators provided a “big” lush sound ideal for string sounds, big pads, and much loved by a lot of EDM artists.
There is no unfortunately no information easily available from Roland regarding the tuning ratios, however there have been attempts at “reverse engineering”, and there is a complex in-depth analysis on line at: Link to download Adam Szabo’s PDF analysis of how to emulate a super-saw oscillator
This is the SynthEdit “Supersaw” module we can create from what we know from this analysis:
It’s a complex beast so lets take this project stage by stage.
https://synthedit-help.co.uk/creating-a-supersaw-part-1/supersaw/
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