How to make an Illenium Style Supersaw in Ableton's Wavetable
Start by opening up Ableton's Wavetable and turn on both Osc A and Osc B
Osc A
- Set Osc A's Wavetable to Basics -> Basic Shapes -> Turn Wavetable Position to 66 (Saw)
- Set Osc B's Wavetable to Basics -> Basic Shapes -> Turn Wavetable Position to 66 (Saw)
- Increase by 12 semitones (one octave)
- One of the Key Ingredients from Illenium's sound, or any type of very large sound is the use of multiple octaves to just add thickness to the sound
- To add some thickness to the sound, let's select Classic under Unison, and change the voices to 7 and lower the amount to 15%
- Increase the sustain from -6db (default) to 0db. This will give you a consistent thick saw sound
- I added a bit of movement to the sound by increasing the attack time to 900ms
- I also lowered the release time to 15 ms
- I increased the resonance to 15% to boost the volume of the cutoff
- I set the cutoff to 18kHz, anything more than this is just unnecessary white noise
- OTT - I parallel compressed the OTT preset in Ableton (Setting the Dry/Wet to 50%)
- OTT is key for all massive saw presets
- Saturator - To add a little distortion to the signal
- Set mode to Soft Sine
- Turn on Soft Clip
- Boost Drive by 5db
- Dial back the Dry/Wet to around 65%
- Reverb
- Turn Dry/Wet to 100% so we can hear only the reverb signal
- Set Quality to High - More CPU but better quality
- Set the Decay time to 5 seconds, this is going to make the Saw sound huge!
- Now we can start playing with the Pre Delay.
- What the pre-delay does is set when the reverb actually kicks in.
- You can play around with the timing and go with what you think sounds best
- I liked it at 7.25ms
- Now we can start playing with the Filter on the Input Processing and really carve out which frequencies our reverb will be affecting.
- Now start dialing back the Dry/Wet
- I went with 35%
- Compressor
- Dial back the Threshold to around -20db and increase the ratio to 16:1
- This is going to reduce the dynamic range of our sound quite a bit which is exactly what we want
- Increase the attack to not effect the initial transient of the sound, we still want it to have its original dynamic
- I went with 14.5ms
- To help bring up the reverb tail, I increased the release to 125ms
- Now we can bring up the Gain
- I always prefer adding gain over just using the makeup because I know how much im actually adding to the signal
- I went with 5dB
- Final Touches - EQ
- For a final touch, I added an EQ in Mid/Side mode and boosted the sides with a high shelf at 2000hz by 5db
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