“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.”
