Pick Yourself: Breathing Life into Flat Sounds—The Secret Modulation Nebula

The landscape of electronic music in 2013 shimmered with a new kind of depth—one that Pick Yourself traces back to the haunting, three-dimensional world of Moderat’s second album. In those tracks, sound wasn’t just heard; it was inhabited, as if each note carried its own atmosphere. The creator’s obsession with this living quality led to a revelation: the secret wasn’t in the choice of synthesizer, but in the artful way it was animated.

Most producers, the video suggests, remain tethered to the surface, mapping simple envelopes to filter cutoffs and calling it a day. But the true evolution lies in daring to modulate parameters that many never touch, weaving movement through the fabric of sound itself. This approach, once glimpsed, becomes impossible to unhear—a magnetic pull that draws us from the flatlands into a nebula of sonic possibility.

Professional tracks don’t just move—they breathe, pulse, and shimmer with emotional intensity. Pick Yourself demonstrates this by contrasting a typical lead synth, technically correct yet lifeless, with a version sculpted by nuanced modulation. The difference is immediate: the latter blooms with depth, each note resonating like a ripple in still water.

This emotional quality, the video reveals, is the result of carefully layered modulation techniques. It’s not about complexity for its own sake, but about creating a sense of space and narrative within the sound. The pros, it turns out, are storytellers, using modulation as their brush to paint feelings across the stereo field.

At the heart of Pick Yourself’s revelation is a system of three modulation layers, each adding its own dimension to the sonic canvas. The first layer, timbre modulation, is where the tone itself shifts and evolves—no longer static, but alive with subtle changes. By mapping both envelopes and unsynced LFOs to parameters like filter cutoff and oscillator position, the sound becomes a living organism, unpredictable and organic.

The second layer, dynamic storytelling, leverages the envelope’s attack and release to shape the emotional arc of a track. Here, the sound doesn’t just exist—it participates in the narrative, swelling and receding in sync with the arrangement. Polyphony and careful automation turn the synth into a storyteller, its voice rising and falling with intention.

Finally, expressive modulation—using velocity, pitch, or MPE controls—adds a tactile layer, letting the performer’s touch influence the warp and stretch of the wavetable. These three layers, when woven together, elevate a simple patch into a dynamic experience, full of sonic ghosts and magnetic resonance.

The third, often overlooked, layer is spatial modulation—the secret ingredient that transforms a sound from a point in space to an enveloping environment. Pick Yourself guides us through modulating effects like echo feedback and granular reverb, using LFOs to create swelling, evolving spaces that breathe alongside the synth.

This isn’t just about adding reverb or delay; it’s about animating the very air around the sound, making the room itself a participant in the music. The interplay of feedback and output, modulated in counterpoint, keeps the effect lush yet controlled. For those who crave truly immersive soundscapes, the nuances of this technique are best experienced in the video itself, where each sweep and swell becomes a tactile, almost visual event.