I've been working on this concept for a while and wanted to write it down - A few years ago, as I was learning to write supersaw parts, I started asking what made them good or not. Listening to Illenium or Seven Lions saws and recreating them, most supersaw individual layers aren't particularly complicated from a sound design perspective. I later discovered the concept of a Fugue - playing 5 or more individual melodies on top of each other to create a complex but coherent song. The key classically to writing a fugue is to have the combination of each individual "line" create a polychord (such as an F minor 7 add 9 in a lot of edm). However, by inverting the notes of the chord and splitting them so that each individual synth or instrument plays a coherent line, you get sounds that are infinitely more interesting than just playing saw triads in root position.
Check out this Bach piece which visualizes each line with a piano roll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o
Its honestly crazy how much this influences the really good edm stuff to me - Afterlife by Illenium is arranged like a fugue. More importantly, almost ALL of Worlds by Porter can be viewed through this lens. The two most obvious examples are Fellow Feeling and Sea of Voices - you can hear each part come in individually. Fellow Feeling is honestly a straight up fugue - its pretty mind-melting. Listening to how each line comes in in the intro on strings, then having the strings replaced by saws in the drop really solidified this idea for me. Learning this stuff is pretty crazy to understanding why good, complex songwriting works. Really wanted to try to write this out, I hope this can help you write more interesting parts so not all your saws are 9 chords in root position.
Submitted April 03, 2018 at 04:26PM by Orendamusic https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/89hijd/classical_fugues_and_their_relation_to_supersaws/?utm_source=ifttt