its worth it. recording some parts of songs to tape adds a certain character to the sound that personally i like.

I guess i left this one wide open. I will try to find some better examples when I'm at a computer tomorrow. Downstate: that honestly sounds like the best idea. I need a tape player for many reasons, and i suppose this just adds to the long list of reasons why to pick one up. Breakphase: thats what i originally thought, was using lfos to get that warped detune effect. I guess the purpose of this thread was to explore different ways of doing it. I'll definitely try both of these. Thanks!

i have the same liking. so i bought a tape player. some old shit tapes. leave them in the sun, unwind them rewind them etc, on my 4 track it has tape speed, if you push that old broken dial a bit it warps the sounds in parts and gives it that old effect. also i tried running some shit to an old vcr too, was pretty cool.  and of course you can always do this quite nicely in soundforge. its good for that. because you can select say 30 secs of synth, and have the pitch move very slightly, or modulate it so it sounds quite authentic. seriously buy a shit old tape player with line in, you'd be amazed how interesting it sounds when you record it back to the computer. even one of those new tape players with a usb input are handy. because its super easy to whack a loop on there and then record to tape, then run from the tape out back into your mixer. i often shun my shure mic, to record glockenspiel with this shit tape player w built in mic, some about the natural tape saturation just makes it sound nicer than a clear, and often too resonant recording from a nice mic. I have roland jv2080, its has lots of patches on it with the sound you are after, as someone said before, mostly its just very subtle lfo on the voices of the patch thaat give that whirling battery dying effect.

what have you tried so far?

Very slow and shallow pitch LFOs (on different voices)? I guess I'm not entirely sure what you're looking for though.

You could record a synth line to tape, pull the tape out, re-spool it and then record it

or just you know, experiment

Well actually a soft synth, but if you knew how with hardware that would still be pretty cool to know! I could have been clearer

do you mean building synth hardware like with soldering and electronics, etc?

I am looking to create some older sounding synths. I love the sound of warped, vintage, synths, as if from cassette tapes or vcr cassettes.
I was watching Terminator 2 and got super inspired. Does anyone know of a good technique? I'm sure it is as easy a slight detune here and there, but I'm wondering how I could automate it. I'm not looking to do this on any medium particular. Thanks!