This paper presents a systematic approach to study the carrier based pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques applied to diode-clamped and cascade multilevel inverters by using multi-modulating patterns. This method is based on the description of controllable redundant parameters in the modulating signals. A unified mathematical formulation is presented for carrier based PWM methods, which obtains outputs similar to the corresponding space vector PWM. A full and separate control of the fundamental voltage, vector redundancies and phase redundancies can be obtained in the carrier based PWM. In this paper, the proposed PWM method and corresponding algorithm for generating multi-modulating signals will be formulated and demonstrated by our simulations.