How to Recreate Future Bass Chords

There is a moment in almost every future bass drop where a huge, shimmering chord swells up, gets slammed down by the kick, and swells again — breathing in time with the beat. That breathing is the sound. It is why a beginner can load a supersaw, play a nice chord progression, and still end up with something that sounds static and flat while a Flume or Illenium record sounds alive. The notes are only a third of the story. The other two thirds are width and movement, and once you can hear them separately you can build the sound in any DAW.

This guide takes the future bass chord apart into the three things that actually make it: a detuned supersaw wide enough to fill the spectrum, an extended chord voiced across the octaves, and a sidechain pump that makes the whole thing move. We will build each one, wire them together into a full chain, and finish with the mixing and the vocal-chop layer that ties a real record together. You can follow along in Serum, Vital, or your DAW's stock synth — the ideas are the same everywhere, and there is a free tool built into this page to hear them change as you drag.

What actually makes a future bass chord

Strip a future bass lead down to its bones and you find three ingredients, each doing a different job. The first is the timbre: a supersaw, which is nothing more than a single sawtooth wave copied many times and detuned slightly so the copies beat against each other. That beating is what gives the sound its wide, chorused shimmer. The second is harmony: not plain triads but extended chords — sevenths, ninths, sometimes elevenths and suspensions — voiced across a wide pitch range so the chord occupies the whole midrange like a pad. The third is movement: a tempo-synced sidechain that ducks the chord's volume on every kick, so the sound pumps and breathes instead of sitting still.

Most tutorials teach these as a single recipe, which is why so many people get lost: they copy a preset and a chord shape and never learn which part is doing what. Learn them separately and you gain control. Want it wider? That is the supersaw. Want it lusher and more emotional? That is the voicing. Want it to move and feel like a drop? That is the sidechain. The genre that grew out of this — and its cousins like melodic dubstep and hyperpop — leans on the same three levers in different proportions. If you want the wider context first, our guide on how to make future bass covers the arrangement and drums around the chords; here we are going deep on the chord sound itself.

The supersaw: one saw becomes a wall

A single sawtooth wave is thin. It has a bright, buzzy tone but it is narrow — it sits in one place in the stereo field and one place in the spectrum. The trick that defines this genre is to take that one saw, copy it several times, and detune each copy by a few cents up or down. Because the copies are almost but not quite in tune, they drift against each other and their combined output constantly shifts, producing the thick, animated, chorused sound everyone recognises.

Movement is the ingredient people underrate most, because it is the hardest to hear on its own. A solo'd supersaw chord can sound finished — but drop it next to a kick and without the pump it just sits there, a slab with no pulse. Train your ear to hear the three ingredients as separate dials: when a reference beats yours, the gap is almost always one specific lever — the chord is too plain, too narrow, or not moving — and knowing which saves hours of aimless tweaking.

The two controls that matter here are voice count and detune amount. More voices means a denser, thicker sound; more detune means a wider, more dramatic spread but also more instability — push it too far and the pitch smears until the chord loses definition. A useful starting point is seven voices with a moderate detune, then adjust by ear against your reference. The same detuned-stack idea powers other classic sounds too, from trance leads to the JP-8000 supersaw that started it all; if you have never built one from scratch, that guide walks through the raw oscillator setup in detail.

Stereo width is the other half of the supersaw's magic. Spreading the detuned voices across the stereo field — panning the copies left and right instead of stacking them dead-centre — is what turns a wide sound into an enormous one. Nearly every soft synth built for this has a "unison spread" or "width" control that does this for you; the more you spread, the bigger and airier the chord, at the cost of mono compatibility you will want to check later in the mix.

One subtlety: unison spread and stereo width are not quite the same as detune, even though they all make the sound "bigger." Detune changes the pitch relationships between voices; spread changes where those voices sit in the stereo image. You want both, but for different reasons — detune for the chorused shimmer, spread for the width. Dialling them independently gives you far more control than cranking a single "super" knob, and it is the difference between a supersaw that sounds designed and one that sounds like a preset everyone else is using.

Choosing your synth

You do not need an expensive plugin to make this sound, but the synth you pick changes how fast you get there. Serum is the industry standard for a reason: its unison engine is clean, its wavetables are enormous, and almost every future bass tutorial and preset pack assumes you are using it. Vital is a free alternative that is genuinely close in quality and, for the supersaw specifically, more than good enough — if budget matters, start there. We compare the two head to head in Serum 2 vs Vital, and if you are weighing a wider shortlist our roundup of the best synth plugins covers the field.

Even a DAW's stock synth will do it. Any instrument with multiple oscillators, a detune or unison control, and a filter can build a supersaw — Logic's ES2, Ableton's Operator or Wavetable, FL's Sytrus or the stock 3xOsc all work. The technique is universal; the plugin is just the vehicle, and once you own it you can chase this sound in a rented studio, a laptop on a train, or a free synth on a borrowed machine. Wavetable synths like Serum and Vital add one more trick on top of the classic supersaw: you can morph the oscillator through a table of waveforms, so the timbre itself evolves as the chord sustains. That movement, layered under the detune and the sidechain, is part of why modern future bass sounds so alive compared to the flatter supersaws of a decade ago. If you are still assembling a toolkit, don't let gear be the blocker — the sound lives in the method, not the brand name.

Building the supersaw patch step by step

Start with a single oscillator set to a sawtooth wave. Turn its unison up to seven voices. Add a small amount of detune — enough that the sound thickens and starts to move, but not so much that individual pitches smear together. Spread the unison across the stereo field until the sound feels wide but still centred enough to carry the chord. At this point you already have the raw supersaw; play a single note and it should sound big, bright, and slightly restless.

How many voices and how much detune? There is no single right answer, but the physics are worth understanding. Each added voice is another copy beating against the others, so more voices means a denser, smoother texture — but past a point the extra copies stop adding audible width and just eat CPU. Seven is a reliable sweet spot; some producers go to twelve or sixteen for a truly enormous pad. Detune works differently: a little adds movement, more adds width, and too much detunes the copies so far apart that the ear stops fusing them into one pitch and the chord turns to mush. Widen with voices and stereo spread first; reach for heavy detune last.

Now tame it. A raw supersaw is harsh in the high end, so add a low-pass filter and pull the top down until the brightness is pleasant rather than piercing. Many producers automate or modulate that filter cutoff so the chord opens up over time, which adds the swelling, evolving quality the genre loves. A gentle amp envelope with a slow-ish attack softens the front of each chord so it blooms in rather than stabbing; a longer release lets chords overlap and smear into one another, which is exactly the wash you want under a vocal. Keep the patch simple at this stage — one strong supersaw beats three fighting layers.

The chords: extended voicings, not triads

Here is where most beginners stall. They build a beautiful supersaw, play a plain major triad, and wonder why it sounds thin and generic. The answer is the harmony. Future bass almost never uses bare triads — it uses extended chords that add colour tones on top of the basic three notes. Add a seventh and the chord gains warmth; add a ninth and it gains that dreamy, emotional lift the genre is famous for; add an eleventh or a suspension and it gains tension and movement.

The practical workflow is to write your progression in plain triads first, so the harmonic movement is solid, then go back and extend each chord. Try turning a major chord into a major-ninth; try an add9 for shimmer without too much jazz; try a sus2 or sus4 for tension that resolves. You do not need music theory to do this — you need your ears and a willingness to hold notes down until something sounds lush. The moment a chord makes you feel something, you have found the voicing.

If you want a shortcut, a handful of extension types cover most of the genre. A major-ninth chord — root, third, fifth, seventh and ninth — is the workhorse; it sounds lush and slightly wistful without any effort. An add9 gives you sparkle without the jazzy seventh. A sus2 or sus4 removes the third and swaps in the second or fourth, creating an open, unresolved feeling that is perfect for building tension before a drop resolves it. Minor chords get the same treatment: minor-nine and minor-eleven voicings are the emotional heart of the darker, Illenium-leaning side of the genre. Learn those five shapes and you can voice almost any future bass progression by ear.

Voicing wide across the octaves

Extended chords sound their best when they are voiced wide — spread across two, three, even four octaves rather than clustered in one. A classic future bass move is to put the root low, then stack the third, fifth, seventh and ninth up high, leaving space in the middle. That gap between the bass note and the high extensions is part of the sound; it lets the chord feel enormous without turning to mud. Producers like Illenium and Seven Lions routinely voice chords across four or five octaves, which is why their supersaws seem to fill the entire spectrum.

Voice leading matters too. When you move from one chord to the next, keep common tones in place and move the other notes by the smallest step you can. Smooth voice leading makes a progression feel inevitable and polished; leaping every note around makes it feel clumsy. If you double the root and third an octave up and down, you thicken the chord further without adding new harmony. Experiment, invert, and listen — the goal is a chord that sounds full and open at the same time.

A practical trap to avoid: piling notes into a single low octave. When you cluster a seventh and a ninth down in the bass register they turn to mud instantly, because low frequencies need space to breathe. The wide voicing exists precisely to solve this — by keeping the root low and floating the colour tones up high, each note gets its own room in the spectrum and the chord reads as rich rather than muddy. If a voicing sounds cluttered, the fix is almost never fewer notes; it is spreading the notes you have across more octaves.

There is an emotional dimension to voicing too, not just a technical one. High, open voicings feel bright and euphoric — the sound of a festival drop at sunset. Tighter, lower voicings feel intimate and melancholy. Where you place the same chord tones changes the feeling as much as which chord you choose, so let the mood of the track guide the register: reach for the sky when you want lift, and pull the voicing down and in when you want the moment to ache.

The sidechain pump: the breathing

This is the single most important technique in the genre, and the one beginners most often miss. In a real future bass record the chords do not play at a constant volume — they are ducked on every kick by sidechain compression and then allowed to swell back up before the next beat. The result is a rhythmic pumping, a breathing motion, that locks the chords to the groove and gives the whole drop its bounce. Take it away and the same chords sound flat and lifeless.

The classic setup is a compressor on the chord bus with its sidechain input fed by the kick drum. Every time the kick hits, the compressor clamps down hard and fast, dropping the chord level; as it releases over the length of the beat, the chord swells back. Moderate ratios around 3:1 to 4:1 with a fast attack give the characteristic pump while keeping the sound musical. Many producers use a silent "ghost" kick or a short trigger note placed exactly where they want the duck, which gives total rhythmic control independent of the actual kick pattern — you can make the chords breathe in a rhythm the drums never play.

The shape of the ducking curve matters as much as its depth. A near-instant clamp followed by a smooth exponential release gives the classic swelling pump — the chord drops the moment the kick lands and glides back up over the beat. Some producers draw this curve by hand with a volume-shaper plugin instead of a compressor, which gives frame-accurate control over exactly how the level falls and rises. Whether you use a compressor or a shaper, the goal is the same: a repeating rhythmic envelope on the chord level, synced to the tempo, deep enough to feel and smooth enough to sound musical rather than choppy.

Because the pump is a thing you feel by adjusting, it is worth hearing it change rather than reading about it. The tool below is a live supersaw chord engine: raise the voices and detune to hear the wall thicken, then push the sidechain depth to feel the breathing appear and, at zero, disappear. It is the same idea you just saw drawn as a curve, now under your fingers.

The relationship between voices, detune and pump is the whole sound in three sliders. When you have a feel for it here, the full Supersaw Chord Designer lets you push it further with more presets and a copy-ready recipe. The sidechain idea is not unique to this genre either — it is the same pump that drives house, trance and a lot of modern EDM, just tuned to different depths.

Setting up sidechain in your DAW

Every DAW has a way to do this. In Ableton, drop a Compressor on the chord track, set its sidechain source to the kick, and dial in a fast attack and a release timed to your tempo. In Logic, the stock Compressor has a sidechain menu in its header; in FL Studio, Fruity Limiter or the stock compressor can be sidechained, and many producers use the classic route of sending a kick to a Peak Controller. The specifics differ but the recipe is identical: kick triggers compressor, compressor ducks chords, release length sets how much they swell back.

The two controls to focus on are depth and release. Depth is how far the chord ducks — too little and there is no pump, too much and the chord disappears entirely and clicks. Release is how quickly it swells back — a release timed to a beat or a fraction of a beat gives that smooth up-swell, while a very fast release gives a tight, staccato bounce. If you hear clicks or pops as the sound ducks too quickly, that is normal on solo'd chords and usually vanishes in the full mix; if it bothers you, ease the attack slightly.

Timing the release to the tempo is what separates a pump that grooves from one that sounds random. At 150 BPM a quarter note is 400 milliseconds, so a release in that neighbourhood lets the chord recover just as the next kick lands. Faster gives a busier, more urgent bounce; slower gives a lazy half-time swell. There is no universal number — set it by ear against the groove — but thinking in note values rather than raw milliseconds gets you close far faster.

A quick way to sanity-check the pump is to solo the chord and the kick together and watch the chord's level meter. You should see it drop and recover in a steady rhythmic wave locked to the kick. If the meter barely moves, your depth is too low; if it flatlines at the bottom between hits, your release is too slow and the chord never comes back up. The eyes confirm what the ears suspect, and once the meter breathes cleanly the whole drop will too.

Vocal chops: the future bass signature

If the supersaw is the body of the genre, chopped vocals are its voice. Taking a vocal — a single sustained note, a phrase, even a one-shot "ah" — and slicing it into a rhythmic, pitched instrument is one of the most recognisable moves in future bass. Flume's early records made this a hallmark: a vocal is stretched, chopped, pitched to follow the chords, and played back like a synth. Layered under or over the supersaw, it adds a human, emotional quality that pure synthesis cannot.

The technique is simple in principle. Find or record a clean vocal, chop it into slices, and map those slices across your keyboard or arrange them into a pattern that follows the chord tones. Pitching the chops to the chord underneath glues them in; adding the same sidechain pump makes them breathe with everything else. Reverb and a touch of formant shifting turn a dry vocal into the ethereal texture the genre loves. Pitching is the part people fumble. If your vocal chop is at a fixed pitch and your chords move underneath it, the two will clash the moment the harmony changes. The fix is to either pitch each chop to a chord tone of the chord playing beneath it, or to bounce the chops to MIDI so they follow the progression automatically. Once the chops track the chords, they stop sounding like a sample stuck on top and start sounding like part of the instrument. When it comes time to sit the vocal in the mix, the same principles from our vocal mixing guide apply — carve space with EQ so the chops and the supersaw are not fighting for the same frequencies.

The full effects chain

With the supersaw built, the chord voiced and the pump set, the last stage is the effects chain that turns a good sound into a finished one. Order matters. After the synth itself comes the filter that tames the top; then the sidechain that makes it move; then the space — reverb and stereo widening — that sets it in a room; and finally the glue that binds the whole thing together into a single cohesive block of sound.

Reverb is what gives future bass its cinematic, washed-out quality. A large hall or plate on the chords, often with the reverb itself sidechained so it ducks out of the way of the kick, creates depth without mud. Stereo widening pushes the sound to the edges of the field. And a glue processor — OTT-style multiband compression is the genre cliche for a reason — evens out the dynamics and adds the aggressive, upfront polish that makes the chord sit right at the front of the mix. Use OTT sparingly; at full strength it flattens everything, but a little brings the supersaw to life.

Sidechaining the reverb is a professional touch worth the extra step. A big reverb on a chord fills the space between kicks with a wash of tail, which can muddy the low end and blur the groove. By feeding the same kick trigger into a compressor on the reverb return, you duck the tail out of the way on every beat, so the space opens up when the chord swells and closes down when the kick hits. The result is a chord that sounds enormous and washed-out without ever sounding cluttered — depth and clarity at the same time, which is the whole trick of a polished mix.

Mixing the chords so they sit

A huge supersaw chord is a frequency hog, and the number one mix problem in this genre is everything fighting for the same space. The fixes are straightforward. High-pass the chords so they are not competing with the kick and bass in the low end — the chords rarely need much below 150 to 200 Hz. Cut a few decibels around 150 Hz to clear mud, and tame harsh resonances up around 2 to 3 kHz where a bright supersaw can get fatiguing. Our guide to mixing bass covers the low-end side of that relationship in depth; the same carve-out logic keeps the chords and the sub from smearing.

Because the supersaw takes the mid and high range while the sub bass takes the bottom, the two can coexist if you keep them out of each other's way. Sidechain the sub to the kick as well and the whole low end locks together. The classic future bass trick of copying the lowest chord note down to make the bass line means the bass and chords move as one harmonic unit — a technique borrowed straight from the way an 808 bass follows the root. Keep your gain staging honest, leave headroom, and let the sidechain do the rhythmic work rather than crushing everything with a limiter.

Watch your mono compatibility. All that stereo width sounds glorious on headphones, but a heavily spread supersaw can partially cancel itself when a club sums the mix to mono, leaving your huge chord thin and weak on a big system. Check a mono fold-down regularly, and if the sound collapses, pull the width back or keep the lowest octave of the chord centred. It is far better to have a slightly narrower chord that survives every playback system than a spectacular one that only works in one ear each.

Reference constantly. Pull up a professionally mixed future bass track you love, match its loudness roughly to yours, and A/B the two. Your chord will almost always be either narrower, duller, or less dynamic than the reference — and hearing that gap directly is worth more than any preset. Mixing this genre is less about secret plugins than about honest comparison and small, repeated corrections until your version holds up next to the record that inspired it.

Making the drop breathe

The sound is built; now it has to live in an arrangement. The most common rookie mistake is having every element play all the time, which turns a dynamic genre into a wall of noise. The fix is subtraction: pull elements out to create contrast, drop the drums for a bar to let the chords ring, or strip the second drop down before piling everything back in. A high-passed version of the chords running under a build keeps continuity into the drop; a single held note adds tension; impacts and risers accentuate the moment before everything hits.

Rhythm is the other lever. Rather than holding chords as static pads, chop them into a rhythm that interplays with the kick and snare — leaving gaps where the snare hits makes the groove pop. Automating the chord volume and filter to create new rhythms, and cutting reverb tails when a chord ends so the next element can shine, are small moves that separate a demo from a record. The overall approach is closer to beat-making than to playing pads; if you are newer to programming drums and grooves, our walk-through on how to make a beat pairs well with everything here.

Contrast is the engine of emotion in this genre. The reason a future bass drop hits so hard is almost always the quiet that came before it — a stripped-back build, a filtered-down chord, a single vocal line — so that when the full supersaw crashes in, the jump in energy does the emotional work. If your drop feels flat despite a great chord sound, the problem is often not the drop at all but the section before it not getting out of the way. Arrange for the swing between tension and release, not just for the loudest possible moment.

Where the sound came from, and where it goes

Future bass did not appear from nowhere. It grew out of the more aggressive electronic styles of the early 2010s as a warmer, more emotional alternative — trap rhythms and dubstep energy fused with pop melody and lush synthesis. Flume's textural, sample-heavy approach set the template; Illenium pushed it toward stadium emotion; San Holo and others took it in more organic, guitar-tinged directions. Understanding that lineage helps you place your own track and borrow deliberately rather than by accident.

The techniques travel, too. The detuned supersaw is a first cousin of the Reese bass — both are built from detuned oscillators beating against each other, just tuned to opposite ends of the spectrum. The sidechain pump drives half of modern dance music. The vocal-chop craft shares DNA with the pitch-and-formant tricks behind sounds as different as the Daft Punk robot voice. Once you own the three levers — width, voicing, movement — you are not just recreating one artist's sound; you have a toolkit that reaches across genres, from dubstep to whatever you invent next.

It is also worth remembering that the goal is never a perfect clone. Recreating a sound is how you learn the mechanics, but the producers who defined this genre did so by pushing the technique somewhere personal — Flume through unusual textures and sampling, Illenium through scale and emotion. Once the supersaw, the voicing and the pump are second nature, the interesting work begins: breaking the formula on purpose. Detune something that should not be detuned, voice a chord in a way the tutorials warn against, chop a sound nobody would call a vocal. The formula is a floor to stand on, not a ceiling.

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