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Reports have surfaced suggesting that inMusic has shut down Native Instruments’ UK office, putting a number of jobs under threat following extensive layoffs across the company rumoured to have taken place in July.

News of the office’s alleged closure arrived in a Reddit post shared on August 5, titled “The layoffs continue: InMusic just fired the whole Native Instruments UK office”.

While it’s unclear how many Native Instruments employees have been affected, a representative for inMusic says that the company is “simplifying its organizational and legal structure, including Native Instruments UK” as part of the “ongoing integration” of the company into the “inMusic family of brands”.

Native Instruments CEO Nick Williams and Chief Product & Technology Officer Simon Cross have also been removed from their posts, according to reports from MusicTech, who reviewed company filings from July. inMusic Europe’s CEO Richard Seymour has since been appointed as a director of Native Instruments UK, suggesting that he has replaced Williams as CEO.

inMusic is the parent company that owns Moog Music, Akai Professional, Rane, Denon DJ, Numark, Alesis and M-Audio, among others. inMusic announced its acquisition of Native Instruments in May, several months after the company entered preliminary insolvency.

Since then, it’s been reported that layoffs across “nearly all departments” have taken place at Native Instruments, with “around 100 individuals” affected. inMusic has declined to comment on the extent of the layoffs.

Following its acquisition of Native Instruments, inMusic shared a video in which CEO Jack O’Donnell and Akai Professional Director Andy Mac discussed O’Donnell’s plans for the company. During the conversation, the inMusic CEO said that the future for Native Instruments would be “very exciting, very bright and very secure”, and that the acquisition was the highlight of his career.

MusicTech also reports that several new positions have recently appeared in inMusic’s directory of career opportunities, including Content Development Engineer, Engineering Manager and Data Product Developer. A number of these roles are based in Rhode Island, USA, and Cambridge, where inMusic has its UK headquarters.

A representative for inMusic provided us with the following statement:

“As part of the ongoing integration of Native Instruments into the inMusic family of brands, we are simplifying our organizational and legal structure, including Native Instruments UK. This includes removing layers that were established to support a private equity ownership model, as well as streamlining other areas of the business to create a faster, more efficient organization focused on innovation, customers, and long-term growth.

“We recognize the impact these changes have on affected employees and are committed to supporting them throughout the transition.

 “Native Instruments remains a strategically important part of inMusic, and our commitment to the brand is unchanged. Product development continues at a strong pace, with major new hardware and software initiatives already underway for 2027 and beyond.”

Today, Native Instruments has announced the release of Super*Saw, a new software synth developed in collaboration with A. G. Cook, the Grammy-nominated producer, solo artist and PC Music founder best known for his work with Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and Beyoncé.

Super*Saw is inspired by the supersaw, a classic synth patch that has figured prominently in Cook’s production work. Built by layering multiple detuned sawtooth waves together, it’s a bold, bright and aggressive sound that’s closely associated with trance music of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Though the technique itself predated the synth, it was Roland’s virtual analogue JP-8000 that popularized the sound through its dedicated Super Saw oscillator.

Native Instruments says that Super*Saw seeks to push the supersaw “further than it was designed to go”, turning a “time-consuming production technique into a fast, fun, and flexible workflow” and producing everything from “rich harmonies to metallic dissonance, ravey leads to impossible glides, euphoria to tension, all from the same sound source”.

Super*Saw is an eight-voice polyphonic synth, but also features monophonic, unison and poly-unison assignment modes. In the Voice Control menu, you’ll find controls to adjust the detuning and stereo width of the voices in Unison mode, along with sophisticated glide controls that can be used to set individual portamento times for each of the synth’s eight voices, and a Shape control that adjusts the contour of the portamento.

The synth features five modulation sources, each of which can be assigned to an unlimited number of parameters. There’s a single tempo-syncable LFO with rate, shape, phase and retrig controls that can be applied per-voice or globally, and this is joined by two tempo-syncable, velocity-sensitive ADSR envelopes.

The instrument uses two independent oscillator banks, Swarm 1 and Swarm 2. Each containing up to 16 detuned saw waves, and combines them with an X/Y Morpher that continuously interpolates between four stored sound states in each corner of the grid.

Additional features include chord and scale constraints, per-voice glide and offset controls, multimode filtering, integrated effects, and a preset library covering a range of lead, chord, pad, and experimental sounds.

Super*Saw also comes with a broad preset library of A. G. Cook-style patches, covering basses, leads, pads, plucks, soundscapes and more.

“It’s funny having my own synth plugin,” Cook says in the video embedded above. “It’s something that’s always been a goal of mine… I’m really interested in very specific tools, and I’ve been excited when I’ve seen certain artists do their own tools around the ideology they have.

“I’ve really enjoyed building on what was established as the supersaw in the ‘90s. A lot of instrument design is about taking things that exist in the world and looking at the corners of it, like: ‘what could we do?’, or ‘what could be improved or flipped on its head?’ To actually be involved in that sort of process, that’s the enjoyment – you’re building into this family tree of a musical idea that was started a long time ago.”

Features:

• Two independent oscillator banks with up to 16 saw waves per bank
• Four-corner X/Y Morpher for continuously blending between four stored sound states
• Chord mode for generating harmonized voicings
• Scale and quantize functions for constraining note output
• Adjustable detune, spread, width, and retrigger parameters for each oscillator bank
• Per-voice glide controls
• Per-voice pitch offset controls
• Stereo motion controls
• Low-pass, band-pass, and high-pass filter modes
• Selectable two-pole and four-pole filter slopes
• Built-in chorus effect
• Built-in delay effect
• Built-in reverb effect
• Mono and polyphonic operating modes
• Factory preset library covering leads, pads, chords, glides, and experimental textures
• Integration with Komplete Kontrol keyboards
• Integration with Maschine hardware and software

Super*Saw is available now for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU formats, and is priced at US$99 / €99.

Today, Native Instruments CEO Nick Williams announced that they – along with iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx – are being acquired by inMusic:

“To our friends, artists, partners, collaborators, and community:

After three months of hard work, and three months of extraordinary loyalty from you, I am pleased to share that a definitive agreement has now been signed for Native Instruments to be acquired by inMusic.

Two iconic music technology companies, with decades of shared respect for this industry and the people who make music in it, are coming together to build something greater than either could alone. Our NKS hardware and MPC Editions collaboration last year was the beginning of this story. Today, we look ahead to a common future.

inMusic has spent three decades building and growing the brands that creators rely on every day — Akai Professional, Moog Music, Denon DJ, Numark, Rane, M-Audio and more. They understand what it means to build tools that musicians love. And they understand what Native Instruments means to our customers and community.”

This dramatically expands the inMusic family of companies, which already includes Akai, Alesis, Denon, M-Audio, Moog, Numark, Rane and others.

What does this mean for the future of Native Instruments, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, & Brainworx?

For the near term, it sounds like it will be business as usual.

“Our commitment is simple: continued investment across all brands and product lines, and a long-term focus on innovation that serves creators at every level,” notes Jack O’Donnell, CEO of inMusic. “The tools you rely on today will keep working, and the tools you will rely on tomorrow are actively being built.”

The acquisition is expected to be completed within a few weeks.